On 20 September 2006, Richard Hammond climbed into a jet-powered car called the Vampire on the runway at Elvington and pointed it down what had been built fifty years earlier to handle nuclear bombers. He reached 280 miles per hour. Then a tyre exploded. The car flipped and ground itself across the concrete that the US Air Force had laid as Britain's longest runway. Hammond suffered serious brain injuries but made a full recovery, and the crash became one of the most famous moments in Top Gear's history. It was also a reminder of what Elvington really is: not a runway, but a 3,094-metre strip of Cold War excess that has been used for fifty years to chase records that civilian roads would never allow.
Elvington opened in 1942 as a satellite of No. 4 Group RAF Bomber Command, originally home to No. 77 Squadron. The squadron lost more than 500 aircrew killed, captured, or missing during its time at Elvington, along with nearly 80 of the four-engined Handley Page Halifax bombers it flew through the Battle of the Ruhr and the campaign against Berlin. In May 1944, No. 77 Squadron moved to nearby RAF Full Sutton, and Elvington became the only airfield in Britain operated by the Free French heavy bomber force. Two squadrons arrived: No. 346 "Guyenne" and No. 347 "Tunisie," both flying Halifaxes against German targets. The French airmen at Elvington were the last survivors of a French air force decimated in 1940. After the war they flew back to France via Bordeaux in October 1945 and became the foundation of the post-Liberation French air force. A memorial to the two squadrons was unveiled in Elvington village in September 1957.
After the war, Elvington spent a few years under RAF Maintenance Command, slowly winding down. Then in 1952 the United States Air Force took it over and rebuilt it on an entirely different scale. The Americans poured a new 3,094-metre runway, the longest in the north of England, and laid down a rectangular hardstanding apron of 19.8 hectares, with a new control tower to match. The intention was to operate Elvington as a Strategic Air Command dispersal base, where nuclear-armed B-47s and later B-52s could relocate during a crisis. SAC's dispersal doctrine relied on spreading bombers across many bases to make them harder to destroy in a Soviet first strike. Britain offered geography. Elvington offered concrete. But the base never became operational. After spending four million pounds, the US Air Force abandoned it in 1958.
After the Americans left, the runway sat available. The Blackburn Aircraft Company used it in the early 1960s for test flights of the Buccaneer, a low-level naval strike aircraft developed near Brough on the Humber. Elvington kept its status as an RAF relief landing ground, used by flying training schools at RAF Church Fenton and RAF Linton-on-Ouse. Trainee pilots practiced approaches on the longest runway most of them would ever see. The airfield finally closed to RAF operations in March 1992. By then the structures dated from multiple eras: French and British wartime buildings, an American Cold War control tower, and the long flat plain of concrete that nobody quite knew what to do with.
In October 1969, Ray Pickrell took a Dunstall Norton onto the Elvington runway and set a national record for the 750cc class flying quarter mile at 144.69 mph. A year later, Tony Densham drove the Ford-powered Commuter dragster to 207.6 mph over a flying kilometre, breaking the wheel-driven UK record Malcolm Campbell had set in 1927. The list grew. In 1998 Colin Fallows hit 269 mph in the Vampire jet dragster. On 5 July 2000 he hit 300.3 mph in the same car, taking the non-wheel-driven British land speed record. In 2019 Guy Martin reached 155.77 mph in a JCB Fastrac, setting a world tractor record. Various world records for the fastest motorised wheelie bin (43 mph) and the fastest electric wheelchair (66 mph) followed in 2020. The British appetite for speed records on a private runway turned out to be inexhaustible.
Elvington today is owned by Elvington Park Ltd and serves a dual purpose. The buildings and control tower house the Yorkshire Air Museum, founded in 1986, which preserves a complete Handley Page Halifax bomber and many other historic aircraft. The runway continues to host land-speed attempts and motorcycle racing meetings run by the Auto 66 Club, which has organized events there since June 1970. Land speed racing here is not without cost. On 1 October 2020, Zef Eisenberg of the MADMAX Race Team died in a crash while attempting to set a British record. Four years earlier he had survived a 230 mph crash at Elvington that broke eleven bones and kept him in hospital for three months. He had recovered and was racing again. The concrete the USAF poured for nuclear bombers still demands its tolls.
RAF Elvington sat at 53.92°N, 0.97°W on the flat farmland five miles south-east of York. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500-2,500 feet to read the immense 3,094-metre Cold War runway and the surrounding apron. The runway remains in private use for motorsport and is privately owned. Nearest active airports: Leeds Bradford (EGNM) 25nm west and Humberside (EGNJ) 28nm south-east. The Yorkshire Air Museum hangars and the rectangular concrete pad of the US-built dispersal apron are the most visible features from altitude, standing out against the surrounding green of the Vale of York.