One Last Race at Tonfanau – Goodbye to One of Britain’s Last True Grassroots Circuits

On Sunday 30 August 2026, motorcycles will once again fire into life at a small circuit tucked away on the Welsh coast near Tywyn.

There will be race vans, trailers and caravans. Riders will be tinkering with bikes in the paddock. Marshals and volunteers will take their positions. Spectators will wander among competitors and machinery before finding somewhere to watch.

In many ways, it will look like countless other race Sundays at Tonfanau.

Except this one will be different.

It will be the last.

After more than three decades of motorcycle racing, the final chequered flag is set to fall on one of the quirkiest survivors of British club racing.

And although Tonfanau was never Silverstone, Donington Park or Brands Hatch, perhaps that's precisely why its loss matters.

Because Tonfanau stubbornly remained what motorcycle racing used to be remarkably good at creating, a club.

From an abandoned Army camp to a motorcycle circuit

The story of Tonfanau begins in circumstances that sound almost too good to be true.

In 1992, Lee Heeson was holidaying with his family near Tywyn in Gwynedd. While walking on the surrounding hillside, he looked down upon an old disused Army camp and noticed its main road.

Where most people might have seen an abandoned military site, Lee apparently saw something entirely different, a motorcycle racing circuit.

As a long-standing member of Crewe & South Cheshire Motor Club, Lee had the contacts – and evidently the determination – to turn the idea into reality.

With support from the club and Nantwich and District Motor Club, the first motorcycle race meeting at Tonfanau was held in 1993. That unlikely beginning started more than 30 years of racing on the Welsh coast.

There were no enormous grandstands or glamorous hospitality suites. Tonfanau developed around the existing roads of the former military camp and remained a short, simple and intensely characterful circuit.

Perhaps more importantly, it was built around people.

Motorcycle racing without the corporate polish

There is something wonderfully old-school about Tonfanau. Much of the circuit has traditionally been prepared by volunteers. Posts, ropes, barriers and protective equipment have to be installed for meetings and removed afterwards.

Marshals volunteer their time. Racers arrive with bikes in vans and trailers. Families camp at the circuit. Spectators can walk around the paddock and actually talk to the men and women they'll later watch racing.

It isn't corporate motorsport pretending to be grassroots.

It really is grassroots.

And that distinction matters.

Modern professional motorcycle racing needs sponsorship, television rights, hospitality, commercial partners and increasingly substantial budgets. None of that is inherently bad; without money, much of professional racing simply couldn't exist.

But somewhere beneath all that needs to be another world. The world where somebody races because they've built a bike in their garage and desperately want to see how fast it will go.

Where a mate becomes the mechanic because he's handy with a spanner.

Where competitors help each other get broken motorcycles back onto the grid.

Where spectators aren't kept at arm's length from the people racing.

Tonfanau managed to preserve that world remarkably well.

Everything from 50cc racers to 1000cc sidecars

The racing itself has been wonderfully eclectic. Over the years Tonfanau has hosted 50cc racers, classic motorcycles, Forgotten Era machines, Minitwins, Supersport machinery, big-bore bikes and sidecars. Look through old race reports and you quickly realise just how wonderfully diverse club racing could be.

In 2016, for example, teenage racer Sam Grief competed on a home-built 50cc Kreidler weighing around 65kg and producing roughly 19bhp – before climbing aboard a Triumph 600 weighing about 200kg and producing around 100bhp for another race.

That almost sums Tonfanau up.

Bring a motorcycle.

Bring some enthusiasm.

Let's go racing.

And the competition could be fiercely serious.

Old ACU reports tell of races decided by hundredths of a second, championships fought over a handful of points and riders using Tonfanau to gain signatures towards their Manx Grand Prix licences.

This wasn't demonstration riding dressed up as racing. It was proper motorcycle racing.

When world champions came to a tiny Welsh circuit

Perhaps the greatest indication of Tonfanau's standing within the racing community is the calibre of riders who have been prepared to ride there.

Four-time World Sidecar Champion Tim Reeves competed at Tonfanau in 2013.

He didn't merely turn up, wave to the crowd and complete a few demonstration laps, he raced. Reeves took three victories and established a new outright circuit lap record of 36.56 seconds.

Over the years Tonfanau has also attracted some of the most recognisable names in British motorcycle racing, including TT legends and leading road racers appearing at parades and demonstrations.

Among them has been John McGuinness.

For a rider whose career has included 23 Isle of Man TT victories, international road racing and factory machinery, somewhere as humble as Tonfanau might appear insignificant on paper. Yet that misses something fundamental about motorcycle racers.

McGuinness has always appeared to understand where the sport comes from. His connection with Tonfanau even reached the point where Crewe & South Cheshire Motor Club presented him with its Tonfanau Race Circuit Outstanding Achievement Award in 2017.

For a man with an MBE, TT victories and some of motorcycle racing's greatest honours to his name, the fact that this little Welsh circuit still occupies a place in his story says rather a lot.

Motorcycle racing isn't only measured in lap records and trophies.

Sometimes it's measured in affection.

A racetrack where spectators still belonged

Tonfanau also offered something increasingly difficult to reproduce at major sporting events. Spectators weren't simply paying customers sitting behind fences watching distant figures circulate. The paddock was part of the experience.

You could look at the motorcycles, meet competitors and watch people preparing the very machines you'd soon see racing.

Camping turned race meetings into weekends away rather than simply sporting fixtures.

There are even accounts from the Earlystocks racing community of competitors arriving on Friday, catching the train from the station beside the circuit into Barmouth on Saturday for fish and chips and a visit to the pub, then returning for Sunday's racing.

It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Perhaps that's why it's so appealing.

Motorcycles. Racing. Mates. A caravan. Fish and chips. A pint. Nobody needed to call it a "premium motorsport experience". It was simply a good weekend.

Tonfanau survived when it could easily have disappeared

The circuit has already demonstrated a remarkable ability to survive.

Lee Heeson and his team kept Tonfanau racing through difficult periods including the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001 and, decades later, the disruption of Covid. Then came a far greater blow.

Lee died in early 2022. After three decades of his involvement, Crewe & South Cheshire Motor Club held its final Tonfanau meeting in August that year. It could have ended there. Instead Paul Myler, John and Jean Price and other members of the existing team stepped forward.

Tonfanau Racing Association Club – appropriately shortened to TRAC – was created and racing continued. Not because somebody had identified an exciting commercial opportunity. Because people didn't want Tonfanau to die.

There may be no better definition of a motorcycle club than that.

Why is Tonfanau closing?

There is one obvious question.

Why now?

At the time of writing, Motorbike Mad has been unable to find a clear public explanation from the organisers detailing precisely why motorcycle racing at Tonfanau must finally end.

The official 2026 regulations confirm four meetings this season, culminating on Sunday 30 August, and those involved with the racing have made clear that this will be the final meeting.

But rather than speculate about land, finance, regulations, insurance or any of the other pressures facing small motorsport venues, we'll leave the reason where it currently belongs:

Unclear.

If a definitive explanation emerges, we'll report it. For now, we'd rather concentrate on something we can establish beyond doubt. What Tonfanau has given motorcycle racing.

When grassroots circuits disappear, something else disappears with them

Losing Tonfanau won't bring British motorcycle racing grinding to a halt.

BSB will continue.

The Isle of Man TT will continue.

Professional teams will continue arriving in enormous transporters, sponsors will continue paying bills and television cameras will continue broadcasting racing around the world. But that isn't really the point. A healthy sport needs foundations, it needs somewhere people can start.

Somewhere affordable enough for ordinary competitors to have a go. Somewhere an enthusiastic youngster can stand in a paddock, smell race fuel, hear an engine being warmed and think:

I'd love to do this.

Grassroots motorcycle racing creates competitors, marshals, mechanics, organisers and lifelong supporters.

Lose one small circuit and the consequences may barely register.

Lose enough of them and one day you look around and wonder where the grassroots went.

One final Sunday

Perhaps Tonfanau's greatest achievement is that it never really tried to become something else.

It was born because one motorcycle enthusiast looked at the roads of an abandoned Army camp and imagined motorcycles racing around them.

Thirty-three years later, they still are.

World champions have raced there.

TT legends have ridden there.

Club racers have won championships there.

Novices have started racing careers there.

Volunteers have stood in the Welsh rain there.

Spectators have wandered through the paddock, chatted with racers and watched motorcycles they could actually relate to.

Thousands of people will have memories connected with that funny little circuit beside the Welsh coast.

On Sunday 30 August, they'll make a few more.

The engines will start. The paddock will come alive. Marshals will take their positions and another day's racing will begin.

And for a few more hours, Tonfanau will remain exactly what it has always been.

Unpolished.

Unpretentious.

Slightly eccentric.

And gloriously grassroots.

Then eventually somebody will wave the final chequered flag.

British motorcycle racing will carry on without Tonfanau.

But it will be just a little less quirky without it.