Fred Craner had ridden seven Isle of Man TTs before he became the man who talked John Gillies Shields into opening up the roads of Donington Hall estate to motor sport. Donington Park became the first permanent park circuit in England, breaking the monopoly that Brooklands had held since 1907. The first 300-mile Donington Grand Prix in 1935 was won by Richard "Mad Jack" Shuttleworth in an Alfa Romeo P3. Then in 1937 and 1938 the Auto Union Silver Arrows arrived, and English crowds saw something they had never seen on home soil - 600-horsepower German Grand Prix cars driven by Bernd Rosemeyer and Tazio Nuvolari at speeds the public roads of Leicestershire could barely imagine. Nuvolari, already a legend in Europe, won in 1938. A year later the country was at war.

Donington's war was quiet and undignified. The Ministry of Defence requisitioned the circuit in 1940 and turned it into a military vehicle depot - trucks parked on the grid, infield grass churned to mud. The army left in 1956 but planning permission for racing was a different matter, and the place sat in slow decline until 1971, when Tom Wheatcroft bought it. Wheatcroft was a Leicester construction entrepreneur and a passionate collector of Grand Prix cars. He fought Leicestershire County Council for years; the council refused planning consent and Wheatcroft appealed; by 1976 the track was laid out again. The first postwar race meeting, on Sunday 15 May 1977, was for motorcycles. Two weeks later, on 28 May 1977, cars raced at Donington for the first time since 1939 - and they had to be classed as a "motor trial" because local ramblers had asserted footpath rights at the eleventh hour. The legal loophole held. Donington was back.

Wheatcroft's Donington Grand Prix Exhibition opened in 1973 and grew into the largest collection of Grand Prix cars in the world until it closed in 2018. The track itself found its identity in motorcycles. From 1987 to 2009 Donington was the home of the British round of the Grand Prix motorcycle world championship, and the Melbourne Loop - added in 1985 to lengthen the circuit - made bike racing here a fixture for a generation. Music came too. From 1980 the Monsters of Rock festival brought Van Halen, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Metallica, and Iron Maiden to the infield. In 2003 it gave way to Download. And in the middle of all of it, almost by accident, came the 1993 European Grand Prix - a one-off Formula One race that landed at Donington because Imola was unavailable. The rain that Easter weekend was relentless. Senna in a McLaren-Ford carved through the field on the opening lap, passing Schumacher, Wendlinger, Hill, and Prost before Coppice, and never looked back.

In July 2008 Bernie Ecclestone announced that Donington had won the British Grand Prix from 2010 for seventeen years. Donington Ventures Leisure Limited would rebuild the circuit to a Hermann Tilke design, add an infield loop, and run spectators in by shuttle bus from East Midlands Parkway. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, the £135 million the project needed never appeared, and by October 2009 the BBC was reporting that the bid was over. Bernie offered the race back to Silverstone. DVLL went into administration in November with debts approaching £18 million. The lease reverted to the Wheatcrofts on Christmas Eve 2009. Donington had lost both the Grand Prix and the British round of MotoGP within the space of a year. Yet the rebuilt track, which had been half-excavated for the F1 project, was patched back together. The circuit reopened in 2010. By 2017 MotorSport Vision had taken over, and the calendar today reads like a who's who of British motor sport - BTCC, British Superbikes, WorldSBK, British GT, the Donington Historic Festival every May.

Stand at Coppice and you can hear East Midlands Airport. The western end of EMA's runway is only 400 yards from the eastern end of the track, which is how Donington became one of the few major motor-racing venues you can fly into directly. Donington Hall itself, the Grade II*-listed house at the centre of the estate, was once the headquarters of British Midland International. In 2021 MotorSport Vision bought the freehold of the hall and the surrounding 28 acres with plans to convert it into a 40-bedroom hotel and a stabling facility for supercars. The cars come and go; the rain returns most British race weekends; somewhere outside the Donington Collections, Senna's memorial still stands.