ABSTRACT
Motor racing has existed as long as the car itself, since competition was an outstanding way to promote and prove product. However, the organizers of the first motorsport events were not car designers or inventers, but newspaper barons, who created events to drive sales of their papers. By definition, motorsport is a mediated experience, and therefore to understand it and its protagonists properly we must consider how the stories are told. Expressed another way, there should be a historiography of motorsport. We must consider the physical sources of our story such as cars, roads, and landscape through the lens of heritage interpretation in addition to traditional texts and documents. This case study applies this approach to Mike Hawthorn, the first British Formula 1 motor racing champion.
