As usual, the soothing sights and smells of carstuff begin before you even leave the car park. Most of the people turn up in modern dreary econoboxes, and many in hire cars as this isn't called an International event for nothing. But some turn up in something a bit more interesting than that. Such as, for example, this rather fine Rover P4. Fortunately it was a lovely hot day, but after the rain we'd had, I half expected it to be axle-deep by the end of the day!
And this... actually, I've no idea what the hell it is. Some kind of kit car, but it does have lovely lines reminiscent of sportscar Maseratis and Fezzas such as the Scaglietti TestaRossas. If you know wot it be, write in and say, lol. Scant carrying capacity, mind, at a venue where it's not uncommon to see people who've come prepared with four-wheeled trolleys the size of car trailers bumping along behind them ready for all the vast amounts of rusty pig-iron they plan on buying!
Sweet little Alfa Junior thing.
I'm sure I've seen this convertible Moggy around before, perhaps even at the Gathering. Little did I know I was shortly to see more Moggies than anyone could have imagined!
This fella can't be doing with mundane ordinary stuff stuck to his wing mirror. Why, anyone can have a blind spot mirror, and anyway if cyclists don't want to be knocked over they should stump up for insurance. No, much better to mount an external temperature thermometer instead!
Always got time to admire a nice pert Imp. "My Gran had one. Used to overheat all the time" grunts Rich/Phil disparagingly. Most of his cars could fit an Imp in the boot, mind. He goes for American muscle, so this kind of thing is a slightly alien concept to him
So the star of the car park style wars for him at least was definitely this rather smart Ranchero. Ford's answer to Chevy's Cameo Carrier hi-po version of their Task Force in the mid-50s was to cut the roof-back off a Custom Ranch Wagon and call it "More than a car! More than a truck!". By the time they'd moved on to using the Falcon platform, Chevy had stepped up their game with the El Camino and the sports pickup concept was here to stay. This one shows signs of a resto-mod that could have used more attention to detail on the prep, since rust is starting to come back through the paint, but it's certainly got "it" from a couple of paces back
So, done with mooching around the cool rides the car park... or more accurately, field... had to offer, we wended our way down the hillside to the museum grounds, navigating past the punters with their bumping and banging tat trolleys. It's still a bargain day out, don't care what anyone says. For round about a tenner, you get into all that the Beaulieu estate normally offers, such as the museum and monorail and all that jazz, but you also get access to the huge autojumble (it's still huge, despite being the "small" one) and the auction paddock where people are selling entire cars intact rather than in bits! Which seemed as good a place to start as there are always some groovy rides to drool over and be glad you left the credit card at home.
Such as this superb 1950 Opel Olympia. I love this sort of hot rod-in-waiting look. It's got just enough of the more commonly-modded Ford and Chevy... actually, it reminds me most of 50s Plymouths... rods about it that I couldn't help but picture it sacked onto its belly, roof-chopped and with wide wheels and whitewalls confusing the hell out of everyone who saw it. Of course, that's close on sacrilegious for such a rare survivor, but you gotta admit, it'd look pretty cool
As regular readers know by now, everything in the 70s was brown. In fact, the Seventies were so brown that some of it even spilled over into the 80s, forcing Ford to continue offering brown Capris for sale long after brown was strictly necessary. Anyone seeing this who's over forty and righteous will be properly in the grip of a Professionals flashback right now
This, evidently, is a Beauford. Nope, me neither. But a quick Google reveals them to be Lancastrian kit cars based on a proprietary ladder chassis and featuring engines from Rover, Nissan or Ford. And, of course, styled like a Georgian townhouse. I'm surprised they get away with the Cadillac-imitating bonnet mascot. No, not because of Health and Safe Tea, nor even trademark infringement, but rather due to the embarrassingly bad quality of the casting
Regular readers will also know I'm no great admirer of French cars by and large. I'm not completely blinkered, though, and when quality voitures like this superb little Renault Juvaquatre 2100 pop up, I'm capable of admiring it as much as the next man. Except in this case, the next man happened to be Rich/Phil who just looked at me despairingly and made a hasty escape. Funnily enough, the whole original point of the Juvaquatre's design was a cheap entry-level car to lure people into the marque who would not otherwise think of buying a Renault, so it's nice to know it still works 70 years later. Also funnily enough, it borrowed heavily from the Olympia parked just a few paragraphs further up the page
Having recently watched the excellent For The Love of Cars and chuckled at the sight of Glennister and Anstead taking their lives in their hands negotiating London traffic in a Messerschmitt, it was funny to see a KR200 here. Not sure about the colour... I mean, I've nothing against the hue, I'm just not sure if it's original. POA seems a bit optimistic, maybe they were hoping the TV glamour would rub off. Crazy little thing, though, really does look like the fuselage of a WWII fighter with a few wheels glued on
Perhaps not solely on the strength of its extra wheel over the Messerschmitt meaning you could park it on a slope and be confident it wasn't going to fall over when you got out, the Fiat 500 is of course the archetype of all small nippy city cars and has both old-sold and outlasted the three-wheeler poverty-spec transport craze by zillions to one. Strange, then, that they're becoming so rare, collectible and commanding such high prices now. I guess if Fiat had made them out of something more robust than leftover spaghetti tins more would have survived. It's only when you see a lovely original one like this that it hits home just how massive and bloated the modern "small car" has become. Hence, perhaps, the comical "too big" numberplate?
Always nice to see a rodded ride. This '40 Mercury might have shared almost everything with the lower-class Ford version except the price but then we're all guilty of being label whores, aren't we? Even back in the days of black and white
I couldn't get a shot of all of this lovely pre-war Lagonda because it was rammed with punters shoving their mullets in the way every five seconds. So you'll have to be content with snippets. As always with vintage cars, I love the use of brass and wood and things we'd treat with derision were they to surface in our modern econoboxes. Bakelite, too. Mmmm, whatever happened to Bakelite? Modern plastics simply don't shatter into needle-sharp shards and infect you with tetanus with the same sense of style and occasion as Bakelite
Likewise this '60 El Camino (cf "Ranchero earlier) was a popular hit with the viewers, and I had to be patient to get any decent photos of it. OK, average photos then. In my youth (if I can pretend to remember that far back) I'd have railed against fake... OK faux, this is the Nu Millennium after all... patina on anything from pencil cases through T-shirts and up to cars. But now I'm much calmer and more tolerant. Yes, really. *ahem* more tolerant, it definitely can have a place and time. And should you need a nonchalantly distressed "shop truck" then I guess you could do a lot worse. Even though it clearly isn't a gasser and therefore slightly misleading as a mobile ad hoarding, perhaps. Dating from a wonderful time when gluing a huge chrome aeroplane/rocket/hang glider to the side of a car guaranteed Mr Jones next door would need one too just to keep up
...which also happened to this Impala. Well, I guess it would, since it's the same model year as the El Camino and donated a lot of it's sheetmetal to the pickup. Odd, really as those fins hardly made for the most practical of rear ends on a utilitarian vehicle. On the Impala they all make perfect sense, of course. Don't they? Just me, then? Better class of rocketship motif on the Impala anyway. Dashboard not calming at all, but marvellously louche and OTT. Aircon unit actually bigger than some fridges I've owned!
VW Thing for sale. Yours for a mild £15 000. Yeah. Well, it did come with a full set of slide-in window screen things. Every time we go to these events, there's always one car that makes us pause and marvel at just how much people will try to charge for the most unlikely of cars... or even worse, what some people will actually pay! Still, if you want to live out your Afrika Corps or ShutzStaffel or staff car fantasies then I guess it's as good a place to start as any. "Qvick, Gerhardt, the Kubelwagen round the front gerbringen-sie. And my gasmask und der Amyl nitrate poppers nicht forgetten, neither."
There's always a Mustang. Usually more. If Astons are the Ford Cortina/Sierra/Focus of the supercar world... that is, ubiquitous... then Ford Mustangs are the Fo... Ahh. Errrm, bugger. Didn't really think this analogy through to it's conclusion before starting it, did I? Anyway, Mustangs. We love them even though they're everywhere. This 'vert certainly looked good from a few paces, although disappointingly turned out to have the WRONG engine in it. With two too few cylinders in a straight block, it was definitely originally specced to be seen in rather to be seen disappearing in. But it does have the original "Pony Seat" interior (yes, really) in the finest vinyl the 1960s could offer, and that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Especially to someone brought up on cowboy stories
Nice Task Force Apache thing. Seemed to be a good day to buy a pickup!
I'll always make time for a T-Bird. This one's a '63, so after the age they started to get a bit big and that but still cool as. After all, Ford's concept of the "Personal Luxury Car" was only coining what we all do anyway, especially those of us with such nonsense as rotaries. After all, no-one buys an RX-7 because they want sensible practical transport they can do the weekly shop and Lidls and then take a load of builder's spoil to the tip in. The Thunderbird was ignoring all the tedium of the daily grind and concentrating on just going fairly fast in reasonable luxury ...but most importantly, looking effortlessly cool whilst doing it... years ago
Funnily enough, I guess the relatively humble Austin Atlantic pre-dates even the Thunderbird's pointless but stylish frippery. Coming to market in 1949, ironically the A90 Atlantic was designed to appeal to the American market. "Designed" is possibly too strong a word, mind you. Legend has it that Leonard Lord (Austin's guvnor) doodled the concept sketch on a napkin before handing it over to their tame Italian stylist Burzi. Anyway, the Atlantic was a four-seat convertible shaped in homage to the snazzy Pontiacs or Mercuries of the day, and sold in literally tens. Sadly for Austin, during its conceptualisation period, the Jaguar XK120 hit the streets and no-one was going to fork over for the slightly odd, dumpy Atlantic when they could have Le Mans-worrying performance instead. Shame, for today it looks delightfully kitsch and cutesy. And unarguably not like anything else on the roads!
I guess the Karmann Ghia is one of those cars that many of us wish we'd considered back when they were within the reach of mere mortals (see also: NSX, Escort MKI, 240Z, etc). Sad times. I've always loved them, especially the coupes over ragtops, but I guess it'll never happen now. Still, at least there are still plenty of admire at dos like this. Gorgeous colour on this one, too
There were a decent number of vintage cars around in the auction field as well as the more modern stuff. Not something I know all that much about, but I do like the shapes and seeing the evolution of systems from veteran copper and wood to modern alloys and plastics. This big four-square Humber 12 looks like the mobsters weapon of choice in my perverted brain. If Capone had lived in Milton Keynes instead of Illinois...
To the best of my memory, I don't think I've ever seen one of these in real life before. All I know about them is from seeing Wayne Carini wittering on about them on Chasing Classic Cars. And I guess if they're rare in their homeland of the USA, they're even rarer over here. I gather that this wonderful beast is a Pierce-Arrow Model 133 dating from 1929. And that's about as much as I can tell you about the car specifically. Can't tell you much about the firm itself, to be honest. It was one of those sole visionary-conceived companies that flourished in the heady early days of production cars, and with the demise of its founder George Pierce, much of the drive must have gone out. The Buffalo company survived until the early 30s following a buy-out by Studebaker and finally succumbed like so many to the Depression-era cull of luxury brands. And they were proper luxury items, Pierce-Arrows, make no mistake. A favourite of movie stars and the great and good of society, all you have to do is look at the man-hours it must have taken to sculpt the headlight pods into the front wings like that to realise this was premium product. And no, I don't think you'd get away with a pedestrian-hostile hood ornament like that nowadays
Even further back in the mists of time this Oldsmobile was pottering around the unmade roads of America. Still on artillery wheels... sans much in the way of braking, I might add, this is a real survivor. Circa 1925, I guess you'd be paying a lot more for a sporty version with Rudge-Whitworth spoked wheels, lol. Big deal, you say, put to put this into some kind of perspective, this car was only made one year after the first dipping electric headlight bulb was invented. In fact, it was only just over e decade since Cadillac produced the first electric lighting system for a car, and only seven years after they invented a method of mechanically dipping headlights without the driver having to stop, get out, and manually do it! Once upon a time, this Olds was a very modern and en-mode design. A snip at 27 and an arf big ones!
Normally (well, at the autumn event anyway) when you leave the paddock hardstanding and wander off into the leafy shade of the ancient chestnut trees, you find all sorts of big-budget sale cars where if you have to ask, you definitely can't afford it. Bonhams usually have a tent full of GT40s and coachbuilt Rollers that us mere plebby mortals are not allowed to get near. This Spring, smaller event however, offers no such distractions. Which isn't to say there aren't a few items worth drooling over. Needless to say, this Ferrari 330 P4 is not a real one. It's a very, very good replica built by the Foremans (of Ford MkIV replica fame and proprietors of the excellent Car Builder Solutions). And I don't care that it's a rep, if I could afford it I'd have it. Like a shot. Fortunately, I can't so my marriage might survive a while longer. It was trailered up here to garner interest for when it goes to auction later in the year, so you're still in with a chance
This adorable little MG 12 dating from 1933 was provided by the same firm, so if you fancy something a bit more sedate than an out-and out race rep, lol. Is that radiator mascot an Alvis one, though? Or just a period aftermarket thing? Write in if you know...
That's pretty much all the auction-y stuff dealt with, more to come in a bit including the actual autojumble-lite, some club cars and a brief potter round the new museum layout. Tune in again, groovers!
proprietors of the excellent Car Builder Solutions). And I don't care that it's a rep, if I could afford it I'd have it.
