2018 British Car Show, Sydney

The 2018 British Car show was held on Sunday at the Kings School.   This is probably the best car show of the year in Sydney.    As usual all the British marques were there.   Also as usual was the lovely display of cars.    Overall it was a great day with excellent weather and interesting cars to see.   Having said that, the Kings School made some changes this year that were not for the better.

This year the Jaguars were moved from the top paddock to the middle one.  This pushed clubs like Rolls Royce and Daimler down to the bottom paddock.  In itself this isn’t so bad, but it has a few flow on effects.   Firstly, the Jaguar display felt a bit cramped and smaller in numbers.    There was a nice line up of E-Types and MK II’s, but other models were in smaller numbers.  Secondly, all cars had to use the same entrance which resulted in traffic gridlock.   I’m surprised there were not more cars overheating trying to get in.   My engine fan was to fail later in the day, but luckily it was still ok at this point.   What was worse was that the cars needed to move over a series of about 5 speed humps that scraped the exhaust system on my car quite badly.

They made better use of the bottom paddock to account from going from three to two, but I’m not really sure to what end.   Instead of the Jaguars on the top paddock there was a food truck and some stands for car dealerships.   It was a bit of a nothing use for a great space.

I can live with the two paddocks, but if they keep up the same route into the event, it would force me to stop bringing my car.   I did have my car on display this year, and ideally would at future events as well.

The two displays I was most impressed with this year was the Triumph display, which had a great turnout of all sorts of interesting triumph models.   And of course perennial favorites Rolls Royce.   This year they had a number of older vehicles that were in stunning condition that I had not yet seen before.  I think a couple of them were Silver Dawn’s, but I am not an expert in 50’s Rolls Royce.    Even though it was at the shannons display, I got to see a Derby Bentley too!  As a coupe, they want serious money for it at the auction coming up in November.

For the first time since I can recall, 3 litre Rover P5’s outnumbered v8 P5Bs.   The P5 was eclipsed by the P5B, and its nice to see the P5 survivors.  There was also a great little MG from the 50s with a dolls house style caravan.   Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to take a photo.   In the Daimler section there was a very impressive older Daimler, I think from the 20s, with a sleeve valve engine.

I also spent some time trying to see if I could find a match for the interior light in my Traction Avant in other British cars.   I’m sure it would have been a standard part used in other cars but I have not yet been able to identify it.    In summary, the 2018 British Car show was a great event and hopefully I will be back in 2019.