Selsey was what was called an Advanced Landing Ground. These were the most temporary of airfields and were devised to support the D Day landings. They generally consisted of a pair of grass runways, reinforced with a steel mesh called Sommerfeld Track. They usually had four Blister hangars (corrugated iron arches) and very few buildings, most of the accommodation being in tents. There were 24 of them distributed along the south coast, from Hampshire to Kent. Some were used by the US 9th Air Force, whilst the rest were used by the RAF.
A few like Selsey were built and brought into use in 1943 as a trial for 3-4 months, but were then decommissioned over the winter months and brought back into use in April 1944. They typically held three fighter squadrons each - in Selsey's case these were RAF Spitfires. Post D-Day these squadrons soon moved into similar temporary airfields in France and so the track was pulled up, the tents removed and the fields returned to farmland. On the ground they are very hard to detect, although you can see where hedges have been removed and replaced later with wire fences on the line of the runways.
Suffice to say there was no peritrack or runways on which to hold motor racing post-war.
Edited by La Sarthe, 20 December 2010 - 13:22.
