Early August, and the Vintage Sports Car Club takes over at Prescott Hillclimb for the weekend. And what a weekend! The paddock is always crammed with exotic and desirable cars, as well as the bizarre and the just plain strange. Reserved for pre-war cars, the trackside car park becomes a kaleidoscope of large headlights, nickel radiators, brass fittings, red tartan rugs and wicker picnic hampers, overlaid by the genteel soundtrack of clinking champagne flutes. But hidden away in the camping area is a whole wealth of other fascinating vehicles dotted among the tent pegs and the camper vans.
Bugatti T37, Amilcar & Morris Minor with a Lea Francis in the background
Contrary to what you would imagine, the most remarkable cars are usually not parked alongside the grandest of motorhomes. More often they sit among small tents that would not look out of place at Glastonbury. The tent has arrived in the boot, or the trunk on the back of the relevant car, and the need for other weekend essentials has therefore limited it's scale somewhat. After all, you need space for the barbecue and the bicycles for the Sunday breakfast time races up the hill!
Riley Nine (?)
I wandered through the site with fellow trader Dirk, a British domiciled German to whom the eccentricities of the British car-fancying classes are a constant source of amusement and approval in equal measures. He liked the large number of unrestored cars, patinated by the passing years, a little rust round the edges and paint dulled or even worn through over time. He admired the fact they were clearly used on a regular basis, and bemoaned the fact that if similar cars were registered in Germany, they would not have retained their original number plates – as so many here do. The system there, he says, is very different unfortunately. Cars simply don't retain that key element of their identity as they move between owners and locations. One of those ‘kept’ number plates sat on the suitably dog-eared ex-Malcolm Campbell Ford V8 Woody station wagon that balloonist Robin Batchelor habitually arrives in. It’s a car that tends to draw a lot of wide eyes looks and nodding approval. I saw Robin later and enthused about it on just this basis, and we agreed patina was best!
Ford V8 Woody Wagon
Another kept-plate was actually Dutch (they seemingly share the British system). It sat on a fantastically elegant blue-grey SS Jaguar with a dull red coachline, and all the right rust in all the right places to broadcast it's age and originality.
SS Jaguar
Next to it was a polar-opposite – a late 1960s Lancia Fulvia in immaculate mid green. Clearly it had undergone a recent and comprehensive restoration but, despite what I just said about patina, I would not have said no if offered this little beauty! It came complete with small luggage rack on the boot and very small test pitched alongside.
Lancia Fulvia
And that's the thing, it's not just vintage cars here. There were all sorts that caught the eye, for all sorts of reasons, from a TVR Tuscan (when did you last see one of those?) …
TVR Tuscan
…to a humble lime green Reualt 5 TL that had come all the way from the Dordogne in France. That was a model of car that half the school teachers of my youth appeared to drive, usually with a “NUCLEAR POWER - NO THANKS” sticker in the back window!
Renualt 5
And it’s funny how even the most prosaic of cars can seem illogically fascinating after the passage of several decades. But far from prosaic was perhaps the smartest car we encountered – a mid 60s Alfa Romeo 2000 in the deepest of dark blues sat there looking absolutely stunning in the light of the setting sun. I actually apologised to the owner that I was ignoring his other vintage car parked right alongside! It seemed like sacrilege to drool over a car that was only sixty years old when the event was actually being held for cars in their 10th or 11th decade of motoring. Daft as it was, the immaculate Alfa was another exception to my patina argument. Well the lack of Wabi Sabi had no negative effect on it's allure to me. I was smitten. The proportions were just pure art. It was the Claudia Cardinale of coupes….
Alfa Romeo 2000
Dirk, having a different national car culture, found different vehicles of equal interest for different reasons. Including a 1980s Mercedes SL and a Porsche 928. He had owned one, and almost bought the other back in the day. But at the end of our meander he'd found a new favourite. “What is an HRG,” he asked as we looked at two examples sat together in the dusk. He had never even heard of the marque. But by the time we had seen perhaps half a dozen more of these spare, sporty offspring of the GN cycle car and a first cousin to the chain-gang Frazer Nash, he'd decided he really wanted one! But I think it had been love at first sight. He only really needed to see that first one.
It's so easy to fall amid such plentiful attractions!
HRG
Porsche 356
Gilbern Invader Estate - a sort of origami version of a Scimitar SE5!
MGA
Cerrano
Bedford RL - a Former ‘Green Goddess’ Army Fire Engine!
