A much better Silverstone Classic than 3 years ago, which although we did attend, it was Ferrari-less due to events earlier in the year. That said, there isn’t really too much that we can say here that isn’t already widely known, as The Classic is one of the biggest motoring events of the year.
The drive in was largely uneventful, although we did have to detour via Willingborough as the A45/A6 roundabout was closed due to planned engineering works. Once queuing to enter Silverstone one of the marshals tried to say something about “number 5”, which did confuse me for a second until I decided to ignore whatever it was he on about and just followed the instructions on my display pass that told me to head to gate 3. And it wouldn’t have been a classic car show without someone suffering a mechanical fault on their approach, and because he appeared to be changing lanes at the time we were cut down to just one lane of three—fun times!
Once parked up and regrouped, we decided to quickly browse the trade stalls while it was still relatively quiet, where I managed to pick up another model Ferrari for my collection: a 250 GTO, but beyond that there wasn’t much else that piqued my interest.
As was expected, there was a great variety of cars—classic or otherwise—on display, ranging from Reliant Scimitar’s to Honda NSX’s. It seems the most popular car though, was a Porsche of some type: there was a collection of 924’s next to the Ferrari’s, the 911’s were scattered around, which may have them grouped by age (I didn’t check), and then there looked to be an entire section for owners that didn’t fit into any other category. The Clio V6’s gave a hint of what my primary car could be and the early Bentley and Rolls showed what proper classics really are.
Lunchtime saw us setup camp at Maggots to catch some of the racing, which at the time was historic Formula 1 cars. There was also track parades for owners of certain marques that were celebrating a milestone. We stuck with the racing throughout the afternoon, despite the rain, however we did occasionally change location to see how the action looked from different points around the track.
By five o’clock people were starting to leave, and we were ready to as well. It wasn’t quite as bad as it looked and I was passing the main entrance within about 15 minutes. After joining the A43 I passed someone who had maybe been a bit to spirited in their departure and pulled over by the police; not the ideal way to end the day! No such drama for us thankfully and all-in-all another successful Classic.
