Car and other photos from the weekend

The main event of the weekend, at least for me, was the Bristol Owners Club annual Concours d’Elegance. This year it was held at the Airbus facility (formerly the home of the Bristol Aeroplane Company) in Filton, Bristol. As well as over 200 Bristol cars there was a selection of Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, some classic cars owned by the factory’s motor club and a Lotus Elite (the glassfibre bodies for the final series of Elites was made by Bristol). There were also some aircraft (as you’d expect).

Enjoy the photos.

Weekend catch up part 3

Time to cover some of the highlights of the Gold Cup weekend. One of my favourite things about the Gold Cup is the support from local classic car clubs who bring all manner of interesting machinery. I failed to photograph a very tidy chrome-bumper Alfa Romeo Alfasud but whoever owns it deserves a medal for keeping it in such great condition.

To start with, the Rolls-Royce enthusiasts club gathered some lovely cars, including a good many series-1 Silver Shadows but my heart was more taken by this Corniche.



If you prefer older cars there was this lovely Thrupp and Maberley 20/25 saloon.



It looked imposing although I noticed a distinct lack of rear-seat leg room. This is certainly not a R-R in which to be chauffeured. Even more interesting was this Silver Cloud.



According to the notice in the window this was a development vehicle and had been fitted with an experimental V8 engine (although I believe it now has the production V8).

It wasn’t just Rolls-Royces, Bentleys were well represented too. I think this is an S-series Bentley Flying Spur Continental but I’ve never seen one with suicide rear doors before.



My favourite Bentley was this one.



Not sure what model it is but I love the lines of this two-door coupé. I’m not sure I have captured its best angle but the cars were so tightly packed it was difficult to get back far enough to line up the photos – especially as I didn’t want to risk scratching someone’s pride and joy.

Lots of Jaguars turned up including plenty of XKs:











The last car was parked in the paddock rather than on open display. Whenever you go to a historic race meeting it is always worth having a look at the cars being prepared for racing, not only do you see interesting machinery like the Jaguar above but on the whole it is a friendly and relaxed place to be. Just remember not to get in the way of anyone working hard to prepare a car for racing.

Jaguars were also present on the track, including Peter Lanfranchi’s standard-looking Series-1 E-type and Steve Tandy’s Lightweight E.



The lightweight E-types did very well in their race but smaller, lighter TVRs with big, American Ford V8 engines seemed to go faster.



In fact plenty of almost prosaic machinery was giving the expensive stuff a run for its money. MGBs, for example, can go far faster than you’d think possible.



I hope this hasn’t been a pictorial overload; I’d like to finish with a personal favourite sighting. It is a Bristol 400 in very tidy condition but looking like a car that is used and enjoyed as it should be.

SMMT Test Day 2008

Last year I wanted to go to the annual Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) test day but I was too slow in applying. This year I was better informed and got my name on the list in plenty of time. As well as providing the opportunity to drive lots of different cars it is a superb opportunity to meet the press officers and press fleet managers and other journalists. I’m sure I could have made more of the opportunities to make contacts but I’m quite pleased that I have made some new contacts.



My day’s driving started with a Jaguar XK8, it was supposed to be an XKR but I wasn’t about to complain. Without a doubt this is a magnificent car, smooth, refined and surefooted. It was a fine way to learn the curves of the Millbrook hill test route and to get a feel for driving round the high-speed bowl. Those test tracks do a good job of replicating country road and motorway driving respectively. There was also a “City Course”, which didn’t feel much like a city but is laid out in a series of tight curves with a couple of speed humps for good measure. I had great fun whizzing round in a couple of Fiat 500s – I fear I may have upset the man from Fiat by saying that I preferred the cheaper more basic model. More than any other car I tested I could see myself actually buying a 500 for my own transport.



The other interesting pastime of the day was to see what was in demand. Bentley, for example, had 4 cars and by lunchtime all the time slots were fully booked. Nissan was taken aback by the popularity of the fuel-cell concept vehicle and so was Audi for the R8 and RS6 Avant. According to the list of vehicles there were 2 RS6s but only one actually appeared to be in use. The Nissan and Audis were the only cars I felt I missed out by not trying – maybe next year.

Cars in Books

To be a successful writer it is important - or so I have been told, more than once so there must be something to it – to read lots of books. Even if it wasn’t important I like to think I’d still try and find worthwhile reading material; there are few things as pleasurable as losing yourself in a good story.

My interest in cars does mean that I take notice whenever they appear in novels. Most people probably don’t notice but getting the details right helps to draw me into the story. Get it wrong and while, if the story is strong enough, I might not give up on the book I will feel somewhat disappointed. Mo Hayder’s thriller Birdman was a superb can’t-stop-turning-the-pages read. The only fly in the ointment was that one of the main characters drove a car identified as a Cobra. This Cobra was no stark, four-wheeled motorbike – it had air conditioning and electric windows. Any sort of winding windows are incompatible with the Cobra shape as devised by AC; there simply isn’t the space in the tiny doors for the window to wind into. Hayder must have been thinking of a different car.



To understand how to get it right you need to get hold of an Ian Fleming. Perhaps not every detail was technically correct but I cannot recall any serious inaccuracies. What he did well was to give a sense of pace and urgency to what was necessarily a lengthy piece of writing when describing a car chase. The most memorable chase was in Moonraker; Bond, in his grey, 4 ½ litre supercharged Bentley, pursued the villain, Hugo Drax, through London and down to Dover in order to rescue the girl (unconscious on the back seat of Drax’s Mercedes 300S) and save the day. At one point an Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 intrudes on the action, you could practically hear the crackle of the Alfa’s exhausts and the whine of the supercharger.


Picture from www.sleepingbeauties.com.au

Thomas Harris, author of Silence of the Lambs, does a much better job. In Red Dragon cars were fairly generic as the narrative focussed on the actions and interactions of the characters. By the time Silence of the Lambs was written Harris indulged in a little more detail; Clarice Starling drove a worn out Ford Pinto, just the sort of car you’d expect a poor student to be driving. In his latest novel, Hannibal Rising, there was a sense of even greater understanding – at one point the young Hannibal Lecter is driving a borrowed van through a rainy Paris evening. To effectively clear the windscreen he had to keep lifting off the accelerator as the wipers worked off inlet manifold vacuum (which causes the speed of the windscreen wipers to slow down as the accelerator pedal is pressed down). It was such an obscure detail, I was deeply impressed to see it used.

Car control

I would be the first to admit that I know very little about this subject, although I am always willing to learn. One thing did strike me whilst watching Fifth Gear on Five tonight. BBC Radio 2’s Sally Boazman was learning the secrets of chauffeuring with the instructor from Bentley Motors. One exercise was skid control, the idea being to control the slide by steering into the skid. I’m sure there are times when this is useful but I was more impressed by the small amount of space that it took for a spinning car to come to a stop. Although spinning to a halt isn’t as impressive as a carefully controlled drift I can see circumstances where it might be more useful.

Coventry Festival of Motoring

Every year the city of Coventry celebrates its association with the motor industry with a major classic car event. It is probably unique amongst classic car shows for two reasons; 1- participants have to pay an entry fee while members of the public can view for free; and 2- this is more than just neatly polished old cars in a park where people admire them, there is a sedate run through the Warwickshire countryside.



This year I knew someone who was taking part so it seemed like the perfect excuse to see what was going on. According to the web site some 540 vehicles took part including commercial vehicles, a couple of Green Goddess fire engines, lots of motorcycles and, of course, plenty of cars. The oldest vehicle on the run was a 1902 Wolseley and the newest a charity-sponsored Lexus IS200 driven by local news presenter Ashley Blake. Famous names like Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Bugatti were represented along side the familiar, household names of Triumph, Austin, Hillman, Ford, Volkswagen and many more.



I was invited to join in, travelling in the comfortable leather passenger seat of a Series 2 Daimler Double Six. There was plenty to see, lots of villages on the route had put up bunting and young and old alike were out waving at the passing cars. The organisers also split the run into two groups, both following the same route but in opposite directions so participants could see and wave to one another. It was great fun and I hope I can take part in an old car of my own one day.

Weekend fun

I took the opportunity to get away for the bank holiday weekend (25th – 27th), to visit friends and watch some motor racing. The weekend started with a trek up the M6, which invited a number of observations.

1. The M6 toll is a wonderful road, beautifully surfaced and it seems to attract well behaved drivers. Everyone keeps left, everyone seems content to travel at their own pace, no one crowds and no one seems aggressive.

2. The M6 toll should be extended north. The way the traffic stopped dead at the end of the toll section brings you back down to earth with a metaphorical bump. It seems that the M6 northbound cannot cope with the traffic from the toll road rejoining.

3. Congestion is self-limiting to a certain extent. The overhead signs warned of congestion for some distance surrounding the junction I needed. However, thanks to a little local knowledge I was able to come off a junction before the hold-up and follow an alternative route. When a road becomes known for slow or stationary traffic people will, wherever possible, modify their journey time or route to find a less congested alternative.

4. Our roads work very well. Even with the traffic as bad as it was my journey from Warwick to Urmston (not far from Old Trafford) took no more than two hours 15 minutes. That’s only 15 minutes more than I would expect the journey to take on a clear motorway.

My improvised route took me through the outskirts of Crewe. I know Bentley is based in Crewe so I was not surprised to see signs offering direction to the factory (although I always associate Rolls-Royce with Crewe even if BMW would rather I didn’t). What did astonish me was that the last of the signs I saw directed people to both the local recycling centre (rubbish dump) and Bentley. It seemed so incongruous that I was tempted to stop and photograph the sign, I suppose it illustrates the old saying, “where there’s muck, there’s brass”!