King said drivers who would go on to be very influential in the post-war sport were there, including Dennis Jenkinson, the journalist and navigator for Stirling Moss, external, and Roy Salvadori, who won the Le Mans 24 hours in an Aston Martin in 1959, external.
The feature event of the day was the Gransden Lodge Trophy, which was taken by Reg Parnell in his Maserati, external in a time of four minutes and 50 seconds.
Just over a year later, Gransden Lodge hosted another bigger race, attracting about 15,000 spectators.
But a new policy from the RAC in 1948 effectively banned casual race meetings at airfields, said King.
“[The Air Ministry] had made this deal with Silverstone to permit more meetings there, and I guess as far as Gransden Lodge was concerned, it couldn’t compete on that level,” he explained.
But he believed what took place at the airfield was a template for how Silverstone would go on to be run.
“Whilst… motorsport would have come back to Britain without Gransden, it certainly wouldn’t have in 1946,” he added.
