Where Speed Meets Time at Brooklands

What is speed without time to measure it? That deceptively simple question sits at the heart of an upcoming Horological Society of New York lecture, where Simon Jeffs—founder of Brooklands Watch Company—will explore the entwined histories of motor racing and precision timekeeping through the story of Brooklands, the world’s first purpose-built racing circuit.

Opened in 1907, Brooklands became Britain’s crucible of speed and innovation. It was there that timekeepers measured performance to a thousandth of a second—an astonishing standard for the early 20th century and the same precision used in Formula 1 today. On that banked concrete oval outside London, the difference between triumph and defeat, between myth and memory, was defined by the steady tick of a chronograph.

Jeffs’s talk charts the drama and discipline born of this pursuit. Brooklands is where Percy Lambert became the first person to cover 100 miles in one hour; where John Cobb pushed land speed records ever higher; and where pioneering women racers such as Kay Petre battled the course and the clock alike. It is also where engineers embraced a practical mantra—if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it—setting the tone for modern motorsport. The result was a culture that treated time not as an abstraction but as a tool, one that turned human instinct and mechanical power into measurable, improvable performance.

The lecture will connect these stories to horology’s broader arc, featuring figures whose influence stretched across garages and workshops. Reid Railton’s engineering genius helped shape record-breaking machines, while watchmaker George Daniels—widely regarded as one of the greatest of the 20th century—once owned the legendary 1929 Birkin Bentley that set a lap record at Brooklands. Jeffs traces the trajectory from mechanical stopwatches wielded by officials dodging flying gravel to the sophisticated timing systems that underpin modern racing, showing how watchmaking has consistently provided the framework for human ambition on the track.

For Jeffs, this history is personal. An aero-mechanical systems engineer and aviation entrepreneur, he founded Brooklands Watch Company in 2017 after a discovery at Brooklands Museum: the Holden Apparatus, believed to be the first dedicated motor racing chronograph. Remarkably, it delivered thousandth-of-a-second accuracy as early as 1907. The find reignited a story that had been hiding in plain sight and sparked a mission to give “meaning to speed” through modern timepieces rooted in that heritage.

Jeffs then turned to Sir Terence Conran for a defining collaboration. Conran’s parents were regulars at Brooklands in its heyday, and the British design icon agreed to create the company’s debut watch, the Triple-Four Racing Chronograph.