Saturday June 28th. Summer is here and like an idiot I am in a short sleeve shirt, facing south, with no shade and no clouds in the sky. For once I am not shaded by a marquee or even one of the trees that abound at Prescott hillclimb. I'm down in the paddock, literally in the thick of things, with Porsches to the left of me - Caterhams to the right - here I am, stuck in the middle with a view. Does that sound familiar from somewhere? Maybe it's just me? The sun is bouncing off the tarmac, my fore arms are turning lobster-red, and I'm regretting the wardrobe choice more with every passing moment.,
It's the weekend of the Bugatti Owners Club members meeting and the non-competitive Garden Party - where the members of that august organisation get to have a play on the hill in their own cars. And naturally they are not just any old cars, although in some cases, without being unkind, they are! But when did you last see a Lancia Beta Montcarlo except on TV (think :The Grand Tour final episode) Let alone a Type 46 Bugatti ?
By invite, I'm not up on the bank overlooking the startline as usual – like Billy-No-Mates. I'm here in the paddock, with a close-up view of almost every car waiting its turn for a run on the hill. The most impressive car in the entry is Ed Burgess' Gould-Opel V6 (once the property of six-time hillclimb champion and former BRM Grand Prix driver Tony Marsh), and that's parked right next to me (see header photo). Ed is much more familiar with a vintage Bugatti, so his progress with the F1-style Gould, which is still new to him, is the subject of much conversation when he and his mechanic stop by for a chat. In fact there have been many interesting conversations all day, and if sales are not exactly sparkling, the social side is. Bugatti authority John Staveley parked himself in my spare picnic chair, and we had an enjoyable and sometime scurrilous chinwag about vintage cars of all kinds – and some of their ‘backgrounds. All of which was quite illuminating, not to say alarming! But my lips are sealed…
My old friends Chrissie and Paul Tebbet also called by. Chrissie used to be in charge of the traders at Prescott, back in the day, while Paul is running his white Rover SD1 rally car, very much like the one I competed in myself back in the early 1990s.
In fact my navigator from that time, Ian Beale, was also around, on a brief visit before a family trip to watch the Brad Pit F1 films in nearby Cheltenham. Ian has helped me out at several events this year, and normally parks his 1948 Citroen Traction (a ‘Slough car’) across the track from the stand.
Sunday isn’t as warm, which is a relief. I have a neighbour in Spencer Elton, one of the few eighty year old teenagers still breathing! He and I go back a scary thirty nine years; I got into the business twelve months before he did. Spencer hillclimbed Brabhams and Coopers back in the 60s, and even raced in British F3 for a while. He also got thumped by an irate James Hunt after the pair tangled at Thruxton. Apparently James apologised almost immediately, and they both headed for the bar to drown their sorrows.
Spencer knows almost everyone, including Ivan Dutton – saloon car racer, Bugatti restorer and now YouTube sensation with his channel SHED RACING. Ivan drives up in lovely early Coventry Climax engined Lotus 7 (below), and naturally a long, scurrilous conversation ensues.
This being the Garden Party day, there is no actual competition on the hill, but there are something like 25 Bugattis parked directly in front on my stall. These range from two diddy 4 cylinder Brescias to a supercharged 5 litre T54 Grand Prix car (below) which arrived from Germany for the event.
Throw in some T35 Grand Prix cars, T37 Voiturettes and assorted larger sports and touring models including a couple of T57s, and you had quite some collection of exotic machinery!
The cars that weren’t Bugattis included a Lancia Stratos, a Lagonda, a Lea Francis, a couple of Lotus Elites & Elans… And that's just the marques starting with L! The entire weekend is a classic car enthusiast's dream.
For a quick video of the Bugatti's passing our stand on their way up the hill CLICK HERE
Previous events held here this season have been a real mixed bag. We did the National Hillclimb Championship round in May, featuring all the top single seaters, many powered by 600-700bhp F1, Indy or DTM derived engines – like Matt Ryder's title winning Gould (below). The speed of these cars really is eye popping in the close confines of Prescott, where you can lean against the fence just a few feet away from them passing by flat out – here's no debris fencing to obscure the view or dull the sensation of speed. It's a very visceral and ‘pure’ kind of motor sport, one that has remained essentially unchanged in nature for many decades.
We also took in the ITALIA day - for cars of Italian origin (bet you never guessed that?) . It proved to be our best day's trading so far this season. If you like Lancia Fulvias, Deltas, Stratos', Maseratis, Ferraris and hot Fiats, it's well worth looking out for neat year .
And there was the HISTORIQUE weekend. a little later, which featured among other things an ex Richard Petty NASCAR which shook the window frames on it's way up the hill having first ‘laid smoke’ in best Naval fashion on the start line.
Purists drooled over the F5000 McLaren M10B (above) which was rather more casually demonstrated and boggled over the Le Mans Cadillac ‘Le Monstre’ recreation which looked too big to fit the narrow course but managed to spin onit's ffirst run and not hit anything! I liked the appropriate transporter it arrived on(below) .
We can almost pass over a rather under-sold “Festival of British Motorsport” in early June. That featured numerous kinds of motor sport-you-can-do-in-your-road-car going on around the venue from auto tests in the top paddock to trials up among the trees. The pre-event publicity for this one had been on the scant side of negligable which was a shame as the few spectators who turned up all really enjoyed the ‘other’ disipines going on aside from the hillclimb itself, which included motorcycles. Next year, I am told, they will make a bigger fuss, now the concept had been tried out in a low-key way. But again as a social event it was good and I ran into my car trials rivals John Cavendish and Dave Slade who normally share a Suzuki X90, but on this ocassion were sharing a supercharged MGB GT (below)
And so to the Bugattis and the sunburn. We haven't exactly varied our appearances much this year by having stuck with the same venue, but all the events have at least been distinctly different from each other!
In July we have an event here that celebrates 50 years of Pilbeam racing cars (Mike Pilbeam also designed the 1974 BRM P201 and the LEC F1 car that David Purley drove in 1977), and in August it's Vintage Sports Car Club weekend. Perhaps we'll see you at one of these?
