Paul Rouse: 'Start your engines' - When Ireland was a motorsport mecca 

But it is an affinity that extends back more than 100 years, all the way to the years immediately after the invention of the motor car.

What happens now in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi — as well as in Rio, Baku, and Monaco — once happened in Dublin.

In her history of the motor car in Ireland, Leanne Blaney chronicled the “incredible tapestry of thrilling races” held in Ireland in the early 20th century.

It began with the Gordon Bennett Cup Race, which was held on a 372.5 mile figure-of-eight course through Kildare, Carlow, and Queen’s County in 1903. This race — which drew competitors from across Europe and America and was watched by up to one million spectators — is considered to be a pivotal moment in the establishment of the modern sport of motor racing.

Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and thousands of volunteers were used to guard the roads and the specially built grandstands. The race was won by Camille Jenatzy, the son of an immigrant Hungarian family who founded Belgium’s first rubber factory, and was known as ‘the Red Devil.’ He remained a huge favourite with the public, and was extensively featured in the Irish press, until his premature death during a hunting accident in 1913. He was apparently imitating a wild animal while on a boar hunt in his French country estate in 1913, when he was mistakenly shot by a confused companion.

Despite the opposition of nationalists such as Arthur Griffith (who described Gordon Bennett Cup Race as a further attempt to Anglicize the island and debauch the Irish public) and others such as James Joyce (who was disgusted by the race’s capitalist connotations and saw it as a decadent folly), the race was considered a huge success.

There was of course an obvious elitism in those who could participate in motorsport, given that there were only 3,195 registered cars in the country by 1909, but the wider public happily flocked to see motor cars — ‘the symbol of the new age’ — race against each other in the years before the Great War. Inevitably, however, the coming of war disrupted the sport, just as it did so many others.

All told, the Irish love of the speed of mechanized sports was everywhere apparent.

Thrills came from the air as well as the ground. Photographs in 1913 of M Pegoud Jamons, a French airman, who gave exhibitions of upside-down flying at an airshow in Surrey, were carried in the Irish papers.

Having been strapped into his Bleriot monoplane, he made a perpendicular dive from 3,000 feet and gradually turned the plane until the chassis came on top, before later righting it.

On landing, M Jamons received a rapturous ovation for his feat of flying.

Such feats were adored by the Irish public and there were seaplane races up the Irish Sea. One such race, for a prize of £5,000 offered by the Daily Mail, ended with a crash at Loughshinny, near Skerries, in north Dublin.

When the pilot returned to the site of the crash on the day after it occurred, he was mobbed by spectators, including 50 female autograph-hunters. While this was a lucky escape which only enhanced the attractions of the pilot, others were not so lucky and Irish pilots were among those who died in seeking thrills in the air.

After the establishment of the Irish Free State, Ireland was promoted as a Grand Prix venue on the international circuit. This move was funded by the Irish public, leading Irish companies and ultimately by the new Irish State.

The ambition to host a Grand Prix was made real in 1929 when the Irish International Grand Prix was staged in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

It drew the leading drivers and car manufacturers in the world to Dublin. More than 100,000 people attended, including the cabinet, and the winning driver Boris Ivanowski was presented with his trophy by WT Cosgrave, the head of the independent Irish government, who had earlier served as starting flag marshal.

The glamour of the venture, the ambitions of the State, the interest of the public, the sheer excitement of it all, sits at odds with clichéd histories of mid-twentieth-century Ireland.

For his part, it appears that Ivanowski was an officer of the Russian Imperial Guard who had fled into exile after the Russian revolution. His feats as a racing driver in his Alfa-Romeo also saw him complete the Le Mans 24 Hour Challenge.

In the Irish press, comment was made on the significance of the event in the Phoenix Park and it was understood as something much more than just bringing the thrill of speed to people’s lives: “When, as during the last few days the Government displays an economic energy and a generous spirit that exalts the Free State in the world’s eye, then Irishmen rejoice not merely for themselves, but for Ireland.”

Newspapers celebrated the “feeling of pride” taken in the successful staging of major sporting events.

The Grand Prix circuit was 4.25 miles long and was used between 1929 and 1931, for the Irish International Grand Prix, later there were six other circuits of various lengths operational for motor racing in the park over succeeding decades.

These tracks saw Dublin continue to serve as a venue for races but after the 1931 Irish International Grand Prix, the Park never again staged a race from the very highest tier of the sport.

The races had depended heavily on financial support from the Government, but the advent to power in 1932 of Éamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil saw that support wither.

The new government would not encourage “a rich man’s sport”.

The inevitable outcome of this decision was that the event was now unsustainable.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.