Autograss: The Greatest Motorsport You've Never Heard Of

It's all too easy to get snobbish about motorsport.

So many series claim to be the best at what they do -  the 'pinnacle' of their particular discipline. Some get TV coverage and millions of worldwide fans, while others languish unloved and unwatched.

There's undoubtable beauty in top-level motorsport, but behind a curtain of technology and high-level sponsorship, it becomes extremely inaccessible. The drivers are celebrities, the cars barely recognisable from those we use every day, and the chance of ever having a go yourself is about as realistic as dating a Hollywood A-lister.

Set your sights further south though, and it's amazing what you can find.

I had something of an epiphany at last weekend's Autosport Show, at the NEC in Birmingham. By chance, I entered into a hall populated with all manner of weird and wonderful vehicles, most of which had one, sole purpose: To go around in circles, very quickly, through grass and mud.

If you're not familiar with the concept, it's thankfully quite easy to explain.

It's called Autograss. Largely indigenous to Britain, hundreds of drivers (male and female and of virtually all ages) meet at large, muddy fields on weekends during the summer, competing over short, unpaved oval courses.

It's split into ten classes, ranging from 1000cc Minis in Class 1 (often driven by 12-16 year olds) to utterly mental class 10 vehicles. The latter is hugely expensive in some cases, and mind-bendingly fast - often built from scratch with the sole purpose of ripping up some countryside.

Whichever class you're in, and there's a lot of variety between class 1 and class 10, the racing is close and the cars are awesome. Don't believe me? The vid below is from a class 8 race - up to 1420cc car engines, or 1350cc bike engines. And it's mental. Wheelies on the start line and three-wheeling it around the corners? Yes please...

Plenty were on show at Autosport. If you like your motorsports to be visual, it's hard to do better than Autograss - the cars look crazy, and bright colours are virtually obligatory. Drivers in one class might use a fairly standard (though completely stripped-out) Vauxhall Corsa or Peugeot 106, while another uses a bike-engined, wide-arched Fiat 126.

Seeing vehicles so clean at the show is a world away from their daily duties, but it became even easier to see the amazing attention to detail some owners lavished upon their cars.

And while the top classes may not be all that accessible, the lower ranks are gloriously simple and satisfyingly cheap. I can think of no better reason for buying a few hundred quid's worth of Nissan Micra than to bin its interior, weld a cage into the shell and hack it around a muddy field all day.

Just look at the pictures here, or watch some of the videos... and tell me you don't want to do the same.

That's Autograss racing. More the "girl next door" of motorsports, rather than F1's Hollywood A-lister. And she's really, really dirty.