There was no sentiment when the axe fell. Almost 60 years since the first British Grand Prix was held on a converted airfield next to a small village called Silverstone in Northamptonshire, time has been called on a national institution.

Bernie Ecclestone knows how to rain on a parade. The thunderstorms that threaten to hit Silverstone during this year’s grand prix will be little more than a damp patch compared with the deluge that Formula One’s impresario poured on to Silverstone’s 60th anniversary celebrations when he announced that he is moving Britain’s most important motor race 60 miles up the road to Donington Park in Derbyshire.

His timing was cruel: Silverstone celebrating its anniversary, the crowd settled in their grandstand seats and the Formula One cars hurtling around a circuit that has become a byword for British motor racing.

But the decision had been coming for years, since Ecclestone’s motorcade was halted at a distant gate as he battled his way through desperate traffic jams to get to the grand prix in 2000. The circuit had been hit by rainstorms for days, caravans and cars were trapped in the mud of Silverstone’s makeshift car parks, but, worse still, Formula One’s ringleader had found out what tens of thousands of faithful spectators had had to endure every year. He arrived, white with rage, to declare that a British Grand Prix at Silverstone was a “country fair masquerading as a world-class event”.

Five years ago he tried again, brokering a three-way deal for him, the Government and the British Racing Drivers’ Club (BRDC), which owns Silverstone, to invest £20 million apiece. If only the BRDC blazers had understood the intensity of Ecclestone’s fury and grabbed the offer.

So when Tom Wheatcroft, an old friend and the owner of Donington Park, turned up at his office in Kensington, West London, with an investor who had £100 million to spend immediately and big plans, he grabbed the chance. That was three months ago and Silverstone’s blazers had been drinking in Formula One’s Last Chance Saloon then.

Damon Hill, the BRDC’s ambitious young president and the 1996 Formula One world champion, has been in long negotiations with the Government to try to win support to convince Ecclestone to stay with Silverstone. Officials even met Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, in Westminster on Thursday. When there was no report back of government subsidies, Formula One’s exasperated commercial rights holder pulled the plug and signed with Donington that night.

As Ecclestone’s statement said: “I believe that the Government should have supported them, which would probably have cost less than 0.002 per cent of the commitment for the Olympic Games.”

There was never going to be government money — as Sutcliffe explained to Ecclestone in a phone call within minutes of the announcement — not for a privately run sport that has earned Ecclestone a personal fortune estimated at £2.5 billion. The Government had spent £8 million on a new road system for Silverstone, largely to meet Ecclestone’s demands after the chaos in 2000, and there was no more.

For Ecclestone, it was too little, too late. He had instructed Hermann Tilke, the German who designed the showpiece Formula One tracks in Turkey and Shanghai, to come up with drawings, which were in Ecclestone’s silver motorhome, parked at the head of the Silverstone paddock yesterday. “The facilities will be fabulous,” Ecclestone said. “What has been put to me by Donington is elaborate and nice.”

That is assuming that Donington hosts the British Grand Prix, for we have been this way before, in 1999, when Nicola Foulston, the owner of Brands Hatch at the time, announced that she had signed a contract to run the grand prix at her circuit in Kent. It did not happen.

Ecclestone’s mystery investor — an English businessman — may have the money, but there are many hurdles for him to jump before Donington holds its first Formula One race, scheduled for July 2010. Donington has been mooted as a venue before but quickly dismissed as even more rundown than Silverstone, with a hopeless surrounding network of single-carriageway roads. Also, Donington lies next to East Midlands airport, which is rapidly becoming one of the busiest in the country; Silverstone will have 2,500 helicopter movements tomorrow, ferrying in VIPs and team members. Can they do that while Ryanair is ferrying thousands of passengers?