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Investigating the condition of the ‘very large’ the speculative project brings car testing and banger racing to the ruins of the Ford Car Factory in Dagenham. A new speedway looks to solidify the thriving but peripheral car cultures of Essex and make relevant  the often misguided ambitions for urban regeneration schemes in London.

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What was once the centre of the British Car industry manufacturing over 10 million cars since 1931, is transformed into a network of race tracks facilitating motor sports from drifting, banger racing and demolition derby to Formula 1 and a commercial testing ground. 

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Responding to the mood of the site the project is a critical retort to recent 'regenerative' schemes in the borough that overlook locality all together. Projects such as 'Barcelona on Thames' and 'Mini-Manhattan' look to distant 'desirable' locations as drivers for gentrification in one of the most deprived areas of London, rather than considering the existing context.

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The Ford Car Plant offers a tremendous post-industrial greyness; where utilitarian buildings  protrude from a landscape scattered with pre-fab offices, pylons and tanks. Meanwhile, in the car sub-cultures of Essex, destruction becomes the desired aesthetic. In our aspirational society that aims for a frictionless way of life these subcultures' chaotic existence is fragile. This project defines an architecture that solidifies this local culture with the mood of the near redundant Ford car plant.

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The overall stripped back materiality of the structure, in-situ concrete structural fins and pre-cast floor plates, relates to the stripped out skeletons of drifting and banger cars where over engineered finishes are removed to cater for the key functions: speed, skidding and friction.

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The structure finds a centre of gravity with repeated load bearing walls. The walls can be understood as trusses. 

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While the network of tracks has a large reach, what actually touches the ground is very little. It is a sinuous plan on legs and where the backs of the structures skirt past each other, incidentally grand spaces emerge in the framework.

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The scheme includes an oval track, a tri-oval, a drag racing strip, a perfect circle constant high speed test track, a formula 1 race track and a mile straight, while the stadia include a double story of car parking with views onto the tracks.