2024 British car show Sydney
Today was the big annual British car show. For years, this show has been held at the Kings School. This year the show was at a new venue – Hawkesbury Showground. I’ve always regarded the annual British car show as the best car show on the Sydney calendar so I was curious how the new venue was going affect that.
The Kings school had two main advantages. It is centrally located in Sydney and the grounds are beautiful. It was normally on at the same time as the school fete, allowing family members who were not all that interested in cars to attend. At the same time, it had a number of drawbacks in that the cars were kind of spread out, getting in and out of the school grounds was a pain, and the drive there an back along congested Pennant Hills road was fairly unpleasant.
Hawkesbury Showground is not nearly as pretty as the Kings School. However, from a practical standpoint it is a better venue a car show. Ingress and egress is very easy, parking for spectators is plentiful, and it is next to a railway station. The cars were all located near each other and each of the clubs had quite a bit of room to spread out. The big drawback is that it is in the northwest corner of Sydney, which probably put some people off. On the positive side, the drive to the show is a lot of fun if you take the back roads like I did.
This year numbers seemed down quite a lot. I suspect the new location had sometimes to do with that. The weather was quite windy and there was a forecast for rain, which never came. I thought the new location was quite good, so I am hoping that club members hear reports of a successful show in 2024 and give it a go in 2025.
I took my Jaguar E-Type and was parked in a nice line up of E-Types. The Jaguar Drivers club had quite a good location at the show, and while numbers were done, a good representation of models. I admired a very nice Series 1 XJ12. This is a model I would like to own one day. There was also a very nice 420, and a series 1 XJ6 I liked.
As you would expect, MGBs and Minis were popular at the show, and there was a good showing of Morris Minors. I thought the Triumph display was probably the best. They had gone to a lot of trouble arranging their cars and had their flags up. The Aston Martin display also had a good number of quite rare cars.
While it wasn’t as big as in prior years, the Rolls Royce display is always a highlight. I saw a 20hp with a really simple but lever mechanism that released a step when the door opened. The step did not just flop down but gently lowered itself as the door opened. Simple but so very effective.
As a fan of the Rover marque, i was hoping to see some good selection of their cars. However this years display was quite small. There was a single P5B saloon, three late P4s, five p6s and a few SD1s.
On the whole I thought the event was a success at the new location and I hope it is able to build up from here and regain its previous size. I enjoyed the day.
