The highways and byways of Belgium

I have been to Spa and back many times by road from Paris and there are basically two sensible choices of routing. You can go north up the A1 autoroute and then curl away to the east to Valenciennes and cross the middle of Belgium to arrive in Liege and then turn south to Spa, or you can go east from Paris to Reims and then take the A34 north-east to Sedan and through the hills into southern Belgium and then head to Spa by way of Bastogne. This route is getting better all the time but there are still chunks of country which one must wiggle through on the Belgium side. One day the European Route E46 may run at high speed from Cherbourg to Liege, by way of Caen, Rouen, Reims and Sedan but there is a bit of building to be done before that happens… On Monday I felt like doing neither route on the way home and so I decided to plot a middle course and see something new. And so from Liege I headed along something called the Route Charlemagne, which potters through southern Belgium to the French border and then joins France’s Route Nationale 2, which in Napoleonic days was the fastest way from Paris to Brussels. The road is rather rural, but includes the dramatic town of Dinant and a place called Chimay, which is famous for beer, although for racing fans it was also the home of the celebrated Grand Prix des Frontières, run on the local roads from the 1920s until the 1960s. It is one of those places that one always means to go to, but somehow never gets round to visiting.

The story began in 1925 when four locals established the Auto-Moto Club of Beaumont-Chimay and organised a race on the fast sweeping roads to the north-west of Chimay, in early 1926. The first event established a successful pattern with motorcycle racing in the morning and car racing in the afternoon. It attracted plenty of big names and top machinery including Yves Giraud Cabantous, Goffredo Zehender plus local hero Arthur Legat. Maurice Trintignant was the big winner in the late 1930s and after the war Trintignant won again, and was joined on the lists by the likes of Prince Bira, Guy Mairesse and Johnny Claes. F1 stopped going after the Le Mans accident in 1955 but in the 1960s it became one of the major venues of Formula Junior and later F3 with a string of men who went on to F1. It remained dangerous with high speed corners and ditches on either side of the road and eventually single seaters moved away completely and it was left to touring cars although a bad accident in 1992 finished off the old track.

I did not know it but a shorter version of the circuit was later built, a fact I discovered when I arrived at a fair pace at a T-junction, when I was expecting a fast, flowing turn! It was on the second time around that I found the “proper” Chimay, a splendid track with a touch of Spa without the hills. There was even a river called the Eau Blanche (White Water) as opposed to Eau Rouge (Red Water)…

We did eventually get back to Paris, by way of Laon and Soissons, but it took about as long as it might have taken in the age of Charlemagne…