Seven Festivals, One Bus Every Two Hours
Demanding
CarFest moved to Silverstone for 2026, seven festivals across one enormous site over the August bank holiday. I went on the Saturday, in the rain, with a press pass and no car. The event was generous almost everywhere I turned. Getting to it very nearly stopped me going at all.
The Night Before
The hardest part of CarFest happened before I got anywhere near it, and it happened at my kitchen table the night before.
I had accreditation for the Saturday. Silverstone has been on my list for as long as I have cared about motorsport, and this was CarFest’s first year there after fourteen at Laverstoke Park Farm in Hampshire. A festival that has raised more than £28 million for children’s charities, moving to the home of British motorsport. I wanted to be there.
What I had not accounted for was that one of the most famous pieces of tarmac in the world is, from a public transport point of view, very nearly unreachable.
Every route I looked at wanted me to take a taxi. Every single one. I kept feeding different combinations into different journey planners and every time the last leg came back as a car I would have to pay for.
I did not want to do that. Partly on cost, mostly on principle. If I am going to write about whether an event is reachable, I should try to reach it the way most people without a car would.
So I looked at the buses. The 88 runs between Brackley and Northampton by way of Silverstone, and on a Saturday there were points in the day where the gap between services stretched to two hours. It also does not stop at the circuit. It stops at Silverstone Park, the business estate, which left me with roughly a kilometre of walking to the entrance.
Two hours between buses, and a kilometre at the end of it. That is not an impossible day. It is a day with almost no margin in it. Miss one connection and the whole thing unravels, and I am standing on a rural road in Northamptonshire in the rain working out what to do next.
It took me a long time to build a route I trusted. Train to Bicester Village, then the 500 towards Banbury, off at Brackley Market Place, then the 88. Written down like that it sounds simple. It took most of an evening, and I went to bed genuinely unsure whether I would go.
This is the part of access that never appears in an accessibility guide. Before the platforms and the wristbands and the shuttle buses, there is the question of whether you can physically get to the gate. CarFest’s own documentation is thorough on almost everything, and its advice for anyone arriving by train is to take a taxi from Milton Keynes, Banbury or Northampton. That is honest. It is also an admission.
The Bus Stop That Read Itself Out Loud
I climbed off the 500 at Brackley Market Place with a change to make and no idea what was coming.
Buses are the part of public transport I find hardest. Trains have platforms and announcements. Buses have a number on the front of a vehicle that is already moving, and if you cannot read it, you cannot flag it. I have stood at stops and let three go past because I did not know which was which. Most of the time I end up asking whoever is next to me, which works right up until there is nobody next to you.
The stop at Brackley had a live departure display, and it was not the sort I usually meet. The ones I normally find are mounted high inside the shelter roof, backlit, small type, and completely useless to me. This one was down on the pole at roughly eye level. Matte rather than backlit, and the closest thing I can compare it to is a Kindle screen. Very large type. Very high contrast. I could read it standing in front of it, in the rain, without leaning in.
Then I found the button along the bottom. Picked out in yellow, labelled in text and in braille. I pressed it and it read the screen out loud to me.
I stood there for a moment genuinely delighted. That is a solved problem. Somebody has designed it, somebody has manufactured it, somebody has fitted it to a pole in Brackley. It is not experimental and it is not expensive by the standards of transport infrastructure. It simply is not everywhere.
I want to be clear about what that one piece of kit did. It removed the single thing that stops me using buses. Not reduced it. Removed it. If those were standard across the country I would use buses far more than I do, and a journey like the one to Silverstone would move from ordeal to inconvenience.
The most effective accessibility I met on CarFest Saturday was bolted to a pole eight and a half miles away.
Through the Gates
The weather did not play ball. It rained, properly, for a good part of the day. It made no difference whatsoever to the crowds. Everybody turned up anyway, in cagoules and wellingtons, and got on with it. Very British, and quite cheering to be part of.
Walking down the road towards the entrance I felt the anticipation build. Silverstone is Silverstone. I have listened to it and watched it for years, and here I was about to walk through the gates for the first time.
The queue helped. There was a group of Chinese drummers playing near the entrance and the rhythm got the crowd swaying while they waited. It turned standing in a line into part of the event, which is not a small thing when queueing is one of the more tiring parts of any day like this.
As I got closer to the gate a member of staff noticed me and came over to ask whether I would like to be shown to the accessible queue. I had not asked. He offered.
That queue was quieter and much easier to navigate, and I was through in no time. It is worth pausing on what actually happened there, because it happened repeatedly across the day and it is the single best thing I can say about CarFest’s staff. Nobody made me ask.
Asking is not free. Every time I have to stop a member of staff, explain my situation, explain what I need and wait to see how they react, it costs me something. Do that fifteen times across a day and you are tired in a way that has nothing to do with walking. A member of staff who sees the situation and offers first is saving you far more than the thirty seconds of conversation.
Seven Festivals, and Why That Matters More Than It Sounds
CarFest bills itself as seven festivals in one, and I assumed that was marketing. It is not. RetroFest, FoodFest, KidsFest, SpaFest, StarFest, Cars at CarFest and the music. Each is a proper event in its own right, and each has its own branding, its own colour scheme and its own music playing across the zone.
That last detail turned out to matter more than the organisers probably realise.
I cannot read a site map at a glance and I cannot pick a signpost out from thirty metres. What I can do is hear that the music has changed, and register that the crowd noise has a different texture, and know I have crossed from one part of the site into another. CarFest gave every zone its own soundtrack for atmosphere. For me it worked as wayfinding.
It came at a price, mind. Seven soundtracks, engine noise from three directions, tannoys, crowds and rain drumming on a hood is a great deal to process, and by mid-afternoon I could feel it. That is not a criticism of a motorsport festival, which is supposed to be loud. It is simply the arithmetic of a long day in a noisy place.
I still got lost, more than once. The site is enormous and there is no getting round that. But there are information points scattered throughout and everybody I stopped was helpful and happy to point me the right way. At one stage I was standing in front of a bank of bins trying to work out which one my rubbish went in, and one of the binmen came over and sorted it out for me. He did not have to do that. He noticed, and he came over.
RetroFest was where I started, and the cars there are arranged by club, which is a genuinely good way to organise a display. You walk along, find a marque you have an affinity for, and stop there. I spent proper time with the Porsche 924 and 944 club and the Toyota MR2 club, which are not the cars that draw the crowds and are all the better for it.
Lunch, and the Value of a Free Sample
FoodFest was a pleasure. Stall after stall, and a lot of them handing out tasters. I worked my way through Yorkshire tea, caramelised nuts and biltong without buying a thing, which felt slightly cheeky and was clearly the point.
I went for lunch early, which meant short queues, and headed to the main food court. The biggest problem with a festival like this is that there is too much choice. It is genuinely hard to decide what to eat when you cannot scan a row of boards and compare.
I ended up at a Persian stand and had an excellent chicken wrap. I chose them for a reason worth putting on the record: they were the only stall that offered me a taste as I walked past.
I could not decide, and they gave me information I could actually use. Not a menu board in a font I would have to walk up to and squint at, and not a photograph. The actual food, in my hand. That was not an accessibility measure. It was a selling tactic. It worked because it delivered the one thing I was short of.
Where I Stood for the Music
The main stage is enormous, and I never got close to it. The grass in front was covered in people who had camped out for the day, and picking my way through several hundred seated bodies with a cane was not a fight I fancied.
So I did not see the stage at all. What saved it was the sound, which carried well enough that standing back cost me less than it would almost anywhere else. This is a music festival. The medium is audio. I heard essentially everything I would have heard twenty metres closer, and I stayed out of the crush while I did it.
The highlight was a conversation with Jake Humphrey from High Performance, which is one of my regular listens. Hearing a podcast I know well happening live, in the rain, in a field at Silverstone, was a genuinely good twenty minutes.
If you have sight loss and you have been putting off a music festival because you assume you need to be at the front, this is the part I would point you at. You do not.
Standing on the Circuit
Two moments at Silverstone landed harder than anything else.
The first came shortly after I entered, walking through KidsFest, when I reached the track crossing. And I stepped onto the circuit. Actual Silverstone tarmac, under my feet. I am not certain which part of the lap the crossing sat on, though I believe it was somewhere near Vale.
The second was walking into the paddock, with the pit building’s distinctive shape behind a row of cars. Walking along the back of the pits at Silverstone is something I have watched other people do more times than I can count. Doing it myself felt like a privilege.
The car paddock was my favourite part of the festival by a distance. Drift cars, rally cars, engine noise arriving from every direction. And then every one of them swallowed whole by a drag car starting up in Drag Avenue. Drag Avenue was superb. Getting that close to cars that quick, with nothing between you and the noise, is exactly what I go to events for.
What I Did Not Know I Was Missing
The pit garages were the one real disappointment, and it took me a while to work out why.
The garage frontages were closed off. I could see the cars parked on my side and that was it. At the time I registered it as a shame and moved on.
It was only afterwards, watching video of the weekend, that I found out what had been in there. A whole line of cars I would have loved to spend time with, and I had not known they existed. I did not walk past them and decide against. I never knew to look.
That is a particular kind of loss and I run into it a lot. If I can tell that something is there, I can ask about it, get closer to it, work out how to experience it. If a barrier means I cannot even register its existence, I can do none of that. The information gap arrives before the access gap does.
What I could see was excellent. Joe Macari’s display, as usual, was the pick of it. The McLaren F1 GTR and the Maserati MC12 are cars I have seen before, and the quality is such that I could look at them daily and not tire of it.
1972 Stimson Safari Six
The best thing about the Cars zone was not the headline machinery. It was the strange stuff tucked into corners, found by wandering down rows I had no particular reason to walk down.
And, parked out on wet tarmac with the tyre wall and the grandstands behind it, a six-wheeled Mini. Orange, white stripe down the flank, open pickup bed at the back and two extra wheels sitting where no wheels ought to be. I loved it on sight.
There was a laminated sheet taped inside the windscreen. I could not read it standing there, so I did what I always do and photographed it to look at properly later.
The story on that sheet is one of the best things I have read in a long time. The car, it said, was pre-ordered by Buddy Holly, who had come to England in March 1958, seen a pre-production Mini and become convinced that six-wheeled Minis were the future. He died before he could take delivery. It then went on display in a Knightsbridge showroom called Cars of the Dead Stars, from which an East End villain called Chopper started it up and drove it out through the plate glass window. He fled to Italy and sold it to Michael Caine, who used it as the stunt double for the white Mini in The Italian Job, thrown from a moving bus to test the cliff angles. Later it was shipped to Japan by a dodgy Essex dealer, used as a children’s ride at a theme park, abandoned in a breakers yard near Fukushima, swept out to sea by the 2011 tsunami and rebuilt from the fragments, the largest of which was the size of an iPad.
At the very bottom of the sheet, in small text, sits a line credited to Johnny Rotten. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?”
The whole thing is a wind-up. A patient, straight-faced, beautifully constructed wind-up, and the punchline is in the last two lines.
Here is what is actually true. The car is real, and it is a Stimson Safari Six, designed by Barry Stimson, built on Mini running gear and sold from 1972, with only around twenty made before the company folded. Buddy Holly did tour Britain in March 1958, which is exactly the sort of real detail a good liar builds on, but he died in February 1959 and the Safari Six did not exist until thirteen years after that. And Rotten’s actual line, delivered at the Sex Pistols’ last gig at Winterland in January 1978, ends with “cheated” rather than “had”.
I got none of this on the day. I got it at home, on a large screen, zoomed into a photograph. Standing in front of the car in the rain, what I had was a wet laminated sheet behind glass at an angle, and what I took away was the one line printed largest at the top. Six-wheeled Mini. Buddy Holly.
I do not think the owner has done a single thing wrong. Quite the opposite. He has made something genuinely funny and put real work into it, and everybody who stood there and read the lot will have got a proper laugh out of it.
But it is the cleanest example I have of something I meet constantly. The joke was not hidden. It was right there, in the open, available to anybody who could read a page of small print in the wet. I could not, so I left with the setup and none of the payoff, and I walked around for days afterwards believing a thing that was never true.
That is what a display board is, for me. Not a source of information but a source of partial information, weighted entirely towards whatever happens to be printed biggest. Headline in, detail out. Most of the time the detail is a date or an engine size and losing it costs me almost nothing. Occasionally the detail is the whole point.
One suggestion, and it is not a complaint. A QR code in the corner of that sheet, pointing at the same words as a web page, would have cost nothing and given me the joke where it was meant to land. Standing in front of the car, in the rain, laughing.
A Dark Room, a Black Sheet and a Vibrating Floor
The Audi RS5 experience was the best-designed thing I did all day, and I do not think anybody designed it for me.
We were queueing to go into a blacked-out room. The staff member on the door clocked that this was going to be a problem and walked in with me to show me where to stand. I did not ask him to. He worked out that a dark room and a white cane was a combination worth doing something about, and he did something about it.
He put me on a coloured octagon marked on the floor, facing a car under a black sheet. A video started, showing the RS5 driving out onto a circuit, and as it played the sheet was drawn back.
What made it work was that it was not just a video. The engine noise came from every direction, properly surrounding, so I could hear the car moving through the space. And the floor was vibrating. Not a generic rumble, but in time with what the car was doing. When it changed gear I felt the shift through my feet. When it ran onto the rumble strips at the edge of the circuit, I felt those too, synchronised with the sound.
For somebody who takes in an event mostly through hearing and touch, that was the richest few minutes of the day. I was not being told about a car. I was in the same room as one, in three senses instead of one.
When it finished we were moved through to a second, well-lit room with another RS5 in it, and the same staff member came with me again to show me the way. Again without being asked. In that room there were technical experts standing with the car, and you could ask them things. Anything. That is worth more to me than any display board, because a board has to be found, approached and read, and a person can simply answer.
None of this was built as accessibility provision. It was built to sell cars. It landed as the most inclusive thing at CarFest, and there is a lesson in that for anybody designing a stand. Multi-sensory is not a compromise for disabled visitors. It is better for everyone, and for some of us it is the difference between watching and taking part.
The Museum I Had to Leave
Every CarFest ticket includes entry to the Silverstone Museum, which is a genuinely generous piece of ticketing and somewhere I have wanted to go for years.
I swung past on my way out. Nigel Mansell’s Red 5, the Williams FW14B he won the 1992 British Grand Prix in. The Aprilia RS125 on which Valentino Rossi took his first world championship in 1997, winning eleven of the fifteen races that season. A little further along, a JOTA Porsche 963, the 2024 LMDh car from the season JOTA finished first and second in the FIA World Cup for Hypercar Teams. The collection is breathtaking and I was in it for a matter of minutes.
I photographed as I walked. That is a technique I use constantly and it is worth explaining, because from the outside it looks like somebody rushing round taking snaps instead of looking properly. What is actually happening is that I am collecting the visit so I can have it later. At home, on a large screen, zoomed in, with time, I can see things I cannot see standing in front of them. The photographs are not souvenirs. They are the second half of the visit.
And the reason I had to cut it short was the bus. The 88 was going when the 88 was going, and if I missed it I was stuck. So I walked out of one of the great motorsport collections in the country after a few minutes, because of a timetable.
The day started with the transport and it ended with the transport, and the event in the middle had almost nothing to do with either.
Practical Notes for CarFest at Silverstone
- Sort your route the night before. Not the morning of. If you are relying on buses to reach Silverstone you have very little margin, and you want to have made your mistakes at home.
- The 88 is the bus. It runs Brackley to Northampton via Silverstone. Note that it stops at Silverstone Park, the business estate, rather than the circuit gate, which leaves you about a kilometre on foot. Check the weekend timetable specifically. Two-hour gaps are real.
- A rail and bus route does exist. Train to Bicester Village, the 500 towards Banbury, off at Brackley Market Place, then the 88. It is neither quick nor frequent, but it works.
- Download your ticket before you set off. CarFest tickets are digital only, through the Silverstone Tickets app, and CarFest warns that mobile signal across the site can be poor.
- Bring photo ID if you have access requirements. Access wristbands cannot be issued without it.
- Access applications close early. For 2026 the accessible campsite, the Personal Assistant ticket scheme and the Event Mobility scooter hire all reached capacity before the event. Apply the moment applications open.
- Blue Badge parking is free but must be pre-registered. For 2026 the deadline fell several days before the festival and ran through a separate online portal.
- Footwear matters more than you think. Tarmac, grass and gravel inside the same afternoon, and the grass turns quickly in rain.
- Eat early. Queues in the main food court were short before the middle of the day and considerably worse afterwards.
- Take the tasters. If you cannot easily read menu boards, the stalls handing out samples are giving you the information everybody else is getting by eye.
- You do not need to be near the stage. The audio across the arena carries well enough that standing back costs you very little, and saves a difficult crossing of crowded grass.
- Photograph as you go. Especially in the museum, and especially any sign you cannot read on the spot. You can look properly later.
Accessibility Checklist
- Accessible viewing platforms: Two. The Trackside Platform at the International Grandstand, open 10:00 to 18:00 daily, and the Main Arena Platform at the Main Stage, open from 15:00 until the end of the concert. Both first come, first served for wristband holders, with a one in, one out policy at capacity.
- Family Enclosure: Fenced areas at the front or side of each platform for visitors who need an enclosed environment rather than a raised view. Mobility scooters are not permitted inside.
- Shuttle service: Runs from Stowe Corner and Customer Corner, daily from opening until all access customers have left. First come, first served, and cannot be pre-booked.
- Distances: Roughly 200m from the accessible day car park to the festival entrance, and roughly 1.5km to the main music arena.
- Accessible toilets: Throughout the site. Those at the viewing platforms are padlocked and need an Access or Facilities wristband. Others open with a RADAR key or are unlocked.
- Changing Places: A Mobiloo high dependency unit in the Music Arena, with further facilities in the Silverstone Museum and the KART Building in KidsFest. Hoists provided, slings are not.
- Sensory provision: Two specialist spaces in SpaFest for 2026, a mobile immersive room using calming projections and a sensory trailer built for regulation and de-escalation. Quiet areas elsewhere on site.
- BSL: Provided across all three days by Performance Interpreting, covering some Main Stage performances, Q&A sessions and some track events. Must be requested in advance on the access form. Volunteers based at the Main Information Tent, 10:00 to 18:00.
- Hearing loops: Available at box offices on request.
- Assistance dogs: Permitted with advance written consent only, applied for through the access form and reviewed by CarFest’s Accessibility Manager. Guide dogs for blind people are explicitly within CarFest’s published definition.
- Equipment hire: Electric scooters and manual wheelchairs from Event Mobility, collected from the Blue Badge accessible day car park. Reached capacity ahead of the 2026 event.
- Ground conditions: CarFest states in its own guidance that the site has grass, gradients and uneven surfaces, and that some areas will inevitably be hard to navigate.
- Blind and partially sighted visitors: No provision published. No audio description, touch tour, sighted guide offer, large print or braille material appears anywhere in CarFest’s 2026 accessibility documentation.
- Official CarFest accessibility page
Final Reflection
I want to separate two things here, because CarFest deserves that.
The site is a challenge. Tarmac, then grass, then gravel, then grass again. Gradients. Enormous distances. Rain on top of all of it. CarFest’s own accessibility guidance says plainly that visitors should expect uneven ground and that some areas will be hard to navigate, and I would far rather have that honesty than a glossy claim that everything is fine. It is an outdoor festival on a working circuit in a British August. Hard ground is part of the deal, and preparing for it is my job.
The transport is a barrier, and that is a different thing entirely. Two-hourly buses and a kilometre walk from the nearest stop are not an inherent feature of a motorsport festival. They are the consequence of decisions made by councils, operators and the venue across many years. The result is that a great many people simply cannot get there, and disabled visitors who do not drive are over-represented among them.
I do not think that is CarFest’s fault. I do think it is now CarFest’s problem, because CarFest has moved in, and a shuttle from Milton Keynes or Northampton station would change the arithmetic completely for a lot of people.
And having said all that, I would go back. Without hesitation.
Because here is what CarFest gets right, and it is bigger than any single facility. Seven festivals in one place means that on any given day, whatever you are actually able to do, there is something for you.
I have been to events where the whole thing hinges on one activity. If you cannot do that activity, or cannot see it, or cannot reach it, your day is over. CarFest is the opposite. If the crowd in front of the main stage is too much, go to RetroFest. If the paddock is too loud, go to SpaFest. If you have no interest in cars whatsoever, there is a full day in FoodFest and StarFest without going near one.
That is not usually discussed as accessibility. I think it should be. Variety is not only about pleasing more people. It is about giving every visitor a route through the day that suits what they can manage, and letting a group with wildly different needs stay together while doing different things.
Would I do it in a day again? No. The site is too big to see properly in one, and I would want two. Which brings me straight back to the transport, because two days means either two of those journeys or camping, and neither is a small ask.
Score the experience, not just the access.
Transport, parking, signage, crowds, orientation.
Queues, ticket checks, security, first noise and lighting.
Lighting, sound, predictability, space to take a break.
Pathways, surfaces, ramps, signage, resting areas.
Sightlines, distance from action, atmosphere, audio clarity.
Clarity, respect, knowledge of access needs, consistency.
Pride, learning, joy inside difficulty. Would you go again?
Small wins, kindnesses, overall meaningfulness.
Reader Challenge and Invitation
Is there an event you have quietly written off, not because of the event itself but because of how hard it looked to get to? I would like to hear which one, and what it would take to change your mind. Sometimes the answer is a shuttle bus. Sometimes it is one evening with a timetable and a bit of stubbornness. Whatever your challenge is, go anyway.
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