Silverstone Festival – still good, but not as good as it used to be?

This great event was founded in 1990 and our seasoned reporter is a keen supporter.

The Silverstone Festival (or Classic, as it used to be known) has been a key part of my classic year for several years now. I usually go on two of the three days, generally letting the weather forecast dictate which of the days I attend. Silverstone – like most outdoor venues, I suppose – can be miserable in the rain, although the challenges presented to competitors can make for interesting racing.

On a good day, though, the event has much going for it – free access to grandstands, pit and paddock areas, a packed schedule of track action featuring some fabulous historic racing machinery, and several thousand classics brought in by a couple of hundred car clubs. Since the event was moved from the end of July to the August Bank Holiday, however, I feel this part of the weekend has declined somewhat – more on that later. There’s also an auction, hosted by Iconic Auctioneers and spread over the three days, offering competition car and road-going classics as well as memorabilia and automobilia.

This year, those in charge of the weather had decided that the Friday and Sunday were the best days to go so I rolled into the circuit both those mornings and headed to the Porsche Club’s location on Brooklands, which proved to be an excellent viewing point as well as being close to many of the other club display areas.

An event on the scale of the Festival –  I think only the Goodwood Revival matches it in the UK in that respect – makes it impossible to cover comprehensively, but I hope to give you all a flavour of the weekend.

Obviously I’ll start with the fabulous array of Porsches that turned up on both days – the club always manages to bring hundreds of members to the weekend, with classic air-cooled Porsches parked separately from the later water-cooled models. As always, the vibrant colours of the ‘70s and ‘80s in particular stood out – here’s a small sample:

Other clubs with big attendances included BMW and the MX5 club, but some of those that used to bring cars numbering in the hundreds have faded quite substantially – I’m thinking here particularly of Ferrari and Aston Martin, whose zones contained almost exclusively cars from the late ‘90s onwards. Mercedes and even the MG and Triumph club numbers were well down, indicative I think of the Festival’s changing focus.

Staying in Italy, the number of Lamborghini’s, Maserati’s, Alfa’s, Lancia’s and FIATs on display were even more limited – just two Lancia’s – but again, some gems to be found, not least the gorgeous 1968 Islero and 1969 Maserati Mistral Spyder.

A pleasant surprise was the sight of a 1953 Nash-Healey among the Healey Owners’ Club stand – the last time I saw one of these UK/Italian/US hybrids was in the US, when I actually saw two in two days, one in the Maine Auto Museum, one on the road in Kennebunkport. Also on show was an even rarer 1951 Alvis Healey 3-litre roadster, one of only 28 made.

Let’s take a walk around the auction – classic car auctions have struggled recently and this one was no different, even though there some beauties on offer across a broad range of prices.  At the higher end of the price scale among the competition cars, one (of two) fire-breathing Metro 6R4 sold for £350,000, and the hammer fell on a spectacular ’73 BMW 3.0CSL Batmobile at £140,000, but you could also go historic racing in an admittedly very scruffy 1962 Lancia Appia GTE Zagato for a relative bargain price of £25k, though it needed a lot of work to bring up to track worthiness…

Among the road cars, there would have been some tough decisions to make…the aforementioned Batmobile could have been paired up with a superb fully restored 1972 3.0 CSL (what a garage they would make!), except it fell a long way short of it’s low estimate of £120k, reaching just £95,000. Staying at the more exotic end of the lots on offer, a gorgeous 1963 Maserati 3500GTI Vignale Spider with just over 2,500 indicated miles under it’s wheels would have required me finding over £500,000 – indeed no-one was prepared to go to that, the hammer falling at just £340,000, hugely disappointing. However, an Inca Yellow Triumph Dolomite Sprint could have been mine for just £14,500 – it wasn’t concours, but looked decent enough, has had new sills and not much else to make it a really nice example, and £12,500 bought an excellent SaffronYellow 1972 Triumph 2500PI that would need minimal work for several years. I really liked this pair, but it seems to me that auctioneers are over-promising owners as to the value of their classics in general.

One thing that hasn’t declined at the Silverstone Festival is the racing and the access to the paddocks, with visitors able to walk around the garages while mechanics are busy preparing their drivers’ cars for the track.

There was a full racing programme, with qualifying on Friday and a total of twenty races on Saturday and Sunday. I have to admit that not all the classes excite me – particularly the more junior single-seat categories – but there was still plenty to enjoy both in the paddocks and on the track.

It’s always a thrill to see early Grand Prix cars from the era of Fangio, Hawthorn and Moss up close, such as Maserati 250F’s, a Ferrari 246 Dino and the gorgeous blue 1948 Talbot Lago T26, as well as a gaggle of Coopers, Lotuses and more.

I’m not sure when we stopped referring to Grand Prix cars and started calling them Formula 1, but the years between 1966 and ’85 were well represented by cars from Lotus, Shadow, Williams, Benetton and more – although no Ferrari.

There was a mighty 1971 Ferrari 512M in the Masters Sports Car Legends class, competing against the likes of the Lola T70, Chevrons and McLarens, but perhaps the classes that attract me the most are those featuring track versions of the road cars I remember as a young boy and teenager – the GT and Touring cars, and there was plenty to light my nostalgic fires here, such as the intimidating BMW “Batmobiles”, including one in one of my favourite racing colours, the orange of Jägermeister – a terrible drink, but great racing livery!

Contesting the oldest motor-racing trophy in the world, the Royal Automobile Club Trophy, were the ‘Pre-’63 GT cars, where E-types, Cobra’s, Healey 3000s and Lotus Elite’s chased each other around Silverstone’s flat high-speed circuit, with a largely similar field competing for the International Trophy for pre-’66 GT cars. Again, cars I – and I imagine many ViaRETRO readers – grew up with.

The oldest cars to take to the track over the weekend were also some of the biggest and most evocative. Pre-war sports cars such as a spectacular 1932 Alfa Romeo 8C Monza with its distinctive red headlamp covers, Blower Bentleys, Talbot 105s and more rumbled around the Silverstone, their drivers sawing away at the wheel, trying to wrestle these large, unwieldy cars around the bends – they worked hard!

Marking thirty years since his death at Imola, an impressive selection of Ayrton Senna’s road and track cars and bikes had been assembled in tribute. I have to be honest here – I’m not a member of the cult of Senna. Sure, he was an outstanding driver, but he also took his competitiveness beyond acceptable limits, particularly with Alain Prost, driving him off the road to win the Japanese GP in 1990 on the opening lap (!), punching Eddie Irvine and generally being involved in a number of collisions – shades of Mr. Verstappen. Nevertheless, the F1 cars in particular assembled in his memory made a very impressive line-up.

Incidentally, after numerous visits to Silverstone, I finally got around to checking out the Silverstone Museum for the first time – after all, entrance was included in the ticket price. While the history of how the circuit came to be is interesting to read about but not exactly visually compelling, the displays of racing bikes, cars and driver overalls and helmets were definitely worth the queueing time.

Having spent most of Friday and five hours on Saturday at the event, I left for the 85km drive home pondering whether I would give it a miss for a year or two – while it remains a major classic event, and I would be lying if I said I hadn’t enjoyed it, just not as much as I used to, and the emphasis lately seems to be increasingly on family entertainment rather than classic motoring. Or maybe I’m just Silverstone’d out after going so often?