Sept 2022 • By Tony Thacker
Presented by HandhFlatheads.com & USAutomotive.co.uk

The annual Rømø Motor Festival was not what I expected. I was expecting a smallish, back-door beach race with maybe a couple hundred participants. Instead, there were in excess of 20,000, some said maybe as many as 30,000 people there for what is essentially a one-day affair although many visitors make a week of it.

People have been beach racing since the earliest days of auto racing but Danish beach racing can trace its origins back to August 23,1919 when Sven Simmelkaer organized the first event but only after the beach had been cleared of World War I mines. In 1923, Sir Malcolm Campbell driving his Bluebird set the fastest time to date of 240 kph. Sadly, the following year a spectator was killed when Campbell blew a tire. And that was the end of that.

That is until 2016 when Danish beach racing was revived by Thomas Toft Bredahl, Carsten Bech, Steffen Sonnberg, Finn Andresen and Holger Sonnberg on another, even more expansive beach just south of Fanø on the west coast of Denmark. My host for the event was McLaren F1 designer Peter Stevens who races a Winfield-headed ’25 T. At Pendine, a similar beach race in the UK, Peter runs about 84 mph, however, that is a flying 1/16-mile event with a ½-mile run up. We were expecting a reasonable result at Rømø where the racing requirements beyond period correct, Pre-WWII-style clothing and a safe vehicle with pre-’47 speed equipment are fairly loose. It’s simple stuff with the emphasis on fun.

To get to Rømø, we had to take a six-hour ferry from Harwich in England to the Hook of Holland and then drive 470 miles north through the Netherlands and Germany into Denmark. It’s not uneventful, there’s lots to see but the wide-open throttle autobahns are mad with endless Porsches, Mercs, Bimmers and ubiquitous white vans rocketing by at break neck speeds.

Despite the European Union, each European country has its own distinctive personality and entering Denmark is a step back in time. Its Legoland, of course, known for cutting-edge design but out on the west coast facing the North Sea and bleak Britain, it’s a step back to simpler times where there is no trash and the people are trusting. For example, we had an overheating problem and drove the T to a small garage owned by one of the festival’s originators Finn Andresen. Finn helped us flush the rad and while we waited for some radiator weld to arrive took off and left us in charge of his shop. That doesn’t happen every day.

On the day of the festival we were woken by the sound of vee twins and vee eights cracking into uncorked life in the hostels and camp sites all around the Poppelgarden B&B run by Niels and Rikke Hobolt. What was truly amazing about Poppelgarden was that after breakfast for perhaps 60 people, there was only one shoebox of trash compared to all the trash we make with all our packaged foods. Likewise, there was no trash on the beach after the event.

There’s only one road from the mainland out to Rømø and Lakolk Strand (the beach) and you can imagine with 20,000-plus people arriving from all over Europe in American cars, trucks and trailers the two-lane causeway gets pretty crowded as do the few narrow roads leading to the beach but somehow everybody arrives and leaves with minimum hassle.

The race is actually held on a public road albeit on the beach so there is no entry fee for the public, that’s right, the spectators pay nothing to see this event which is an 1/8-mile drag race on sand. The only income for the organizers is from race entries, vendors, merch and sponsors. They don’t have pre-event access to the beach—because it’s a public road—and so set-up cannot begin before 5 am on the day of the race and at the end everything has to be returned to the way it was.

Tech inspection takes place on the Friday before the event at another location on the south of the island which means that you get to see all the entries crusin’ the street sans fenders, mufflers, etc. We saw no cops. After tech, a few of us drove out to another endless beach at Sønderstrand for an impromptu photo shoot while others attended the first of two big parties. Meanwhile, I got the op to drive Swede Krister Lindblom’s Deuce Roadster powered by a 304 ci flattie with parts sourced from H&H Flatheads. Not my car so I took it easy but I made a couple fast rips up and down the beach—it was a fitting prelude to race day.           

Because of the time needed to prep the course, racing does not begin until a civilized 10 am giving everybody time to breakfast leisurely. As there’s little official presence most of the race cars were driven onto the beach and lined up behind the start. There really aren’t any groupings, you just choose off who you want to race and go for it. Despite the early overheating problems, Peter did very well and won eight or nine of his ten races—nobody, not even us was really keeping score. It was just fun to be out from under Covid and having a good time with cars.

And what a selection of bikes and cars there were, everything from a monstrous Hispano-Suiza, that won last year, to several British Riley sports cars, an Austin 7 and a Morris 8, a Packard and the expected field of flathead-powered early Ford hot rods. However, perhaps my favorite car was a Harley-powered racecar built by the late Swedish Formula 1 World Champion Ronnie Peterson.

When all was said and done, the fastest car of the day was a S.Co.T.-blown, Ardun-headed, flathead-Ford-powered ’34 5-window owned by Jens Nybo. In second place was Swede Krister Lindblom in his Deuce Roadster.

Sadly, our long day on the beach came to an end and our new-found friends departed for the far reaches of Europe. As we bid then adieu we couldn’t help but wonder how climate change and rising sea levels could affect this stunning venue. My advice, best go before it’s too late.

 For more info on the Rømø Motor Festival go to: https://www.romomotorfestival.dk/race or, https://www.facebook.com/romomotorfestival