Following on from last week’s item combining a couple of shows from Spetchley Park, this week I thought I’d bring together two distinctly different local events, with the second of them boasting a line-up of one of motoring’s most famous marques that would enhance even Goodwood or the Hampton Court Concours of Elegance.
Caffeine & Machine – great name! – is actually a number of things. It’s a bar, café, and restaurant; it’s a shop and it’s a boutique hotel, set in very nice surroundings near Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon and with a couple of additional open-sided tents in the grounds for attendees to gather in. The venue has one over-riding theme – it celebrates any machine on wheels. It’s open seven days a week and runs a variety of meetings and events, some themed, some just open to all, throughout the year.
Themed evenings or weekends include the likes of Strassenkultur, dedicated to all things German, FWD Thinking, dedicated to front-wheel-drive hot-hatchbacks, and Daikoku Nights, where the theme is tuned and modified Japanese cars. I recently went to another of their themed evenings, the Air-Cooled Appreciation Society (ACAS) – you can guess what that’s about. The age of the car you take there is irrelevant, it just has to be interesting in some way.
Despite owning three (still) German classics, I haven’t yet been to a Strassenkultur event, but I did go to an ACAS evening a short while back in my 911, and there was a fair amount of interesting machinery there, not all of it of the air-cooled variety, it has to be said, but these are merely the focal point of the evening, interesting varieties of the water-cooled variety are also welcome.
C&M is about a 30-minute drive for me, and I rolled up on a warm summer evening and was put next to the most interesting car of the meeting – a 1938 Tatra 97. The T97 is such an intriguing car, with a front end that resembles the VW Beetle, a prominent central fin running down the back of the car, itself a long fastback, and large air intakes on either side behind the rear pillars – nothing else looks like it, other than another Tatra. I have seen this particular Czech classic before, at the NEC; it’s run by one of the team at Practical Classics magazine, and it’s the only T 97 I’ve ever seen. These were two rear-engined air-cooled fastbacks, both standard-setters in their time, but other than that, very different.
As you might expect, an evening focused on air-cooled cars resulted in a fair number of VW Beetles and pre-996 Porsches, with one of my favourites being a 1956 Porsche 356A in silver with the ultimate 356 numberplate – 356 POR, and unlike many 356’s that one sees at classic events and indeed, a couple of the 911’s on show here, this one was the real deal.
There appeared to be a red Carrera 2.7RS on show, and though the number plate indicated a 1972/3 car, the DVLA lists it as manufactured in 1975, so unless their data is incorrect (not impossible), it was a recreation. Looked good, though. There was also what looked like a later Carrera RS – a white 1990 964 with all the right badging but, unfortunately, it predated the actual 964 Carrera RS by a couple of years…sometimes it’s really hard to know what you’re looking at.
Another favourite on the evening was an excellent bright orange Karmann Ghia coupé – I know these are more show than go, but they do look very cool – and of the other Volkswagens, the most interesting were the two Type 3’s; one a 1967 fastback in a very bright purple, the other a Squareback van from the following year. The Type 3 was one of the forgotten VW’s, but it seems to have gained in both popularity and price recently, although the admittedly mint 1600TL Fastback currently on sale in Italy for €47,700 is surely a one-off.
It wasn’t just Porsches and Beetles at C&M – there were a couple of Citroën 2CV’s and FIAT 500’s present and among the water-cooled, a Sierra RS500 Cosworth and a pair of E30 BMW’s one of which looked like it might be an M3 but I have my doubts…
It’s an interesting venue, C&M, and while classics are only a small part of its world, there’s always a few interesting machines on site for classic enthusiasts at any given time. I’ll be back…
We live on the edge of the Cotswolds, an area of Designated Natural Beauty roughly in the middle of England and very popular with tourists, both UK and international. Within its boundaries are motor sport venues such as Prescott Hill and Shelsley Walsh, and many small, picturesque villages, some no more than hamlets.
Broadway is one of the best known and most popular of these, and we love to visit it when we can, it’s only 20 minutes away. It can also get very busy, and the weekend of the Broadway Car Show is one of the busiest. The show was a two-day affair; my other half and I went on the second day and I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised by what we saw.
It’s one of the smaller shows in the area, maybe 60 or so cars, parked on the village green and on the high street, but what cars some of them were! The undisputed stars of the show were a line-up of ten Bugatti’s – all of them the real thing, not a Teal in sight – brought to the event by the Bugatti Trust, which is based at and operates Prescott Hill Climb. This astonishing display of one of motoring’s most famous and glamorous marques at a small village show included a 1930 Type 44 Tourer, a 1926 Type 37, a 1932 Type 51, a 1923 Type 30 Tourer – the earliest known surviving Type 30 – and a beautiful 1928 Type 40 “Lidia” coupé in yellow and black among a stellar array of Gallic loveliness.
Unsurprisingly, these wonderful cars were the centre of attention and were almost constantly surrounded while we were there, making it difficult to take photographs but there was much else to enjoy in this small village show. The pre-WW2 emphasis with the Bugatti’s was continued with a 1927 Lancia Lambda in red, resplendent in the sun on what was a very warm day, as was a quartet of superb examples of British motor engineering from the 1930’s, starting the decade off with a 1930 Rolls Royce 20/25 in blue, followed by a stunning 1933 Lagonda 4 ½ in a deep maroon or burgundy, a Frazer-Nash from the same year in almost the same colour and ending with a lovely 1939 Bentley 4 ¼ Tourer in two-tone blue – glamorous cars that belied the Depression-era from whence they came.
It wasn’t all between-the-wars fabulousness, though – there were also some fine examples of 1950’s, ‘60s and ‘70’s classics, not least a beautiful red 1959 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider (my other half’s car of the day), a gorgeous 1964 230SL Pagoda in metallic grey and in the car park, a lime green 1973 Porsche 914 2.0 in mint condition – I’d be happy with any one of these!
From nearby Coventry, there were a couple of fine gentleman’s carriages in the shape of a red 1952 Alvis 3-litre TB21 roadster and an immaculate 1966 metallic blue Alvis 3-litre TF21 coupé, as well as a pristine 1954 Daimler Conquest Roadster in cream, apparently named Desdemona.
There was more, as you will see in the gallery below – this was a mini-blockbuster of a show that took place in a very pretty setting on a hot summer’s day – I’ll keep my eyes open for it next year, see if I can get the 911 included.
