She Asked If I Wanted to Sit In It: Salon Privé, Blenheim Palace

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Moderate challenge

The Jaguar came past me at walking pace and I heard the whole shape of it go by.

That is Salon Privé, on the lawns at Blenheim Palace, and it is the moment the whole day turned on.

That is not something you get at a car show. Cars at shows are furniture. They sit on grass with their bonnets up and their wheels turned at a flattering angle and they are, for me, an absence with a crowd around it. This one was moving, on its way to the main stage, and for about four seconds I had the entire thing: where it was, how big it was, how slowly it was having to behave itself.

An XJ220, on Furlonger’s stand. Not a road car with a good story attached to it: Furlonger have it as the actual chassis that went to Le Mans in 1993 and crossed the line first in the GT class, before the organisers disqualified it a month later over catalytic converters it had never been required to fit. Everybody still counts it as a win. It is now road legal, and on the stage somebody was saying how extraordinary it must be to own a car like that and be allowed to drive it on ordinary roads. I was standing on the grass thinking I had just had the better half of that deal, because I got to hear it work.

Salon Privé moves. That is the thing about it. Five days, five different events, thirty thousand people across the week, and cars going up and down all of it.

The Lawns Before the Gates Open

I have been to Blenheim before. It deserves the reputation, and I say that as somebody who is going on the sense of a place rather than the view of it: the size of the thing announces itself long before anyone describes it to you.

I knew there would be clubs. I did not expect them to hold their own against the house.

Waiting for the show to open I walked the lawns down by the lake, and it went on and on. Maserati. Ferrari. Porsche. Aston Martin. Invicta, which I had not expected. Several more after that. Decades of models, marque after marque, laid out across ground that runs down towards the water.

You cannot cover it. Nobody could cover it. I am not going to pretend I did.

Inside the Garden

Through the gates, the show is smaller than the lawns outside it. Considerably smaller. And that is the correct decision, because what it loses in acreage it makes up for in the fact that almost nothing in there is ordinary.

Furlonger were the stand that stopped me. Alongside the Jaguar they had a Bugatti EB110, which is a car I have been waiting years to be in the same field as. I have read about them and argued about them and never once stood next to one.

This is the only right-hand drive EB110 there has ever been. The factory held a chassis back to develop the right-hooker, because Britain and the Far East were where the sales were going to come from, showed it at the British Motor Show in the autumn of 1994, and then went bankrupt before a single customer car followed it. So it is one of one because the company died, which is not the reason anybody wants.

Koenigsegg were there in force, with Supervettura bringing a whole rank of them including the CC850. The Colour Collection had gone for white this year, and finding twenty cars of that calibre in a single colour and then laying them out on the lawn in front of the palace is the sort of idea that sounds simple until you think about the phone calls.

The one that drew the crowd was Pagani against Bugatti. You could hear where it was from a long way off, which is its own review. Any one of those cars would carry a stand on its own. Putting them together produced a genuine throng, and the noise a throng makes tells you more about a display than the display does.

There was the Holland & Holland Overfinch Range Rover, which I had wanted to see for a long time and which is a stranger and better thing in person than in photographs. And there was a Michael Schumacher Formula One car, a real one, also on the Furlonger stand and on its way to auction.

That is the shape of Salon Privé. Not a big show. A dense one.

The Supercat

My afternoon turned on a car that was, again, in motion.

TWR were bringing the Supercat up towards the main stage, and Ghandi was walking alongside it. I have been following this car for a while, through Tiff Needell’s recent drive of it and through seeing it at Goodwood and CarFest, and I said something to that effect as it went past.

She invited me over for a chat, so I went for a closer look.

Then she asked whether I would like to sit inside it.

I want to be careful about how I describe what happened next, because bucket list is a phrase that gets thrown at things that do not deserve it. Being near that car is one thing. Getting into it is a completely different transaction. You go from being a spectator to being, for about two minutes, a participant, and there is no other moment in a day at a motor show where that line gets crossed.

She had also noticed something, which is the part I keep coming back to. She saw that I was reading the car with my hands and she let me get on with it, and then she started pointing me at the bits worth touching.

And it is a car that rewards that. Alcantara on the wheel, which has a grain to it that tells you immediately it is not leather. The gear lever milled out of a single block of metal, cool and heavy and completely different under the fingers from anything cast. Carbon fibre, endlessly, with that faint weave you can feel if the lacquer is thin enough. I could not tell you what colour any of it is. I could tell you exactly how it is put together.

Then she called Fergus Walkinshaw over.

TWR is his company. His father was Tom Walkinshaw, whose original TWR ran the Jaguars that won Le Mans in 1988 and 1990, and built the XJ220 in partnership with Jaguar, and entered the cars that took that disqualified class win in 1993. The modern TWR is a separate business, founded in 2020, and the Supercat is its first car: a Jaguar XJS reworked into something else entirely, supercharged V12, six-speed manual, eighty-eight of them and no more, the number chosen for the 1988 win.

He was generous with his time in a way that directors of small companies at trade events usually are not. He took me through the materials properly, and through what TWR does and does not do itself. Almost everything happens in house. The exceptions are the things where somebody else is simply better equipped, so the brakes come from AP Racing and the carbon-fibre panels are made by a specialist with the right facilities. Everything else is theirs.

So I asked him how he handles the challenges of running a project this size.

He said, more or less, that he does not really feel there are that many.

Grass, and a Sentence on Their Website

The site is step-free throughout, which matters and which I want to say before anything else.

It is also entirely on grass. All of it. That is the single most useful thing anyone can tell you before you book, and it changes the day completely depending on what you are working with. Grass that thousands of people have walked over is not flat, it is not predictable, and it does not warn you. Down by the lake, where the clubs are, the ground runs away at a real gradient. That is not a hazard so much as a thing to have decided about in advance.

Everything else is organised. This is an event in its twenty-first year and it shows: plenty of food, plenty of it good, and no sense anywhere that anybody was improvising. I did not need much from staff across the day, and what I did need I got without any fuss.

What I did not see, anywhere, was a single visible piece of accessibility provision. No dedicated queue. No signage. Nothing on the ground that said this has been thought about.

That is not the same as saying nobody has thought about it, and the difference is worth setting out properly.

Salon Privé does publish access information, and more of it than some events I have covered. Blue Badge holders get directed to specific parking with a complimentary shuttle to the entrance. Blenheim, separately, hires out wheelchairs and mobility scooters, issues a free carer ticket at the gate to Blue Badge holders, and runs a touch tour for visually impaired visitors, which is genuinely more than most palaces manage.

Two things in that provision are worth reporting plainly.

The first is that Salon Privé’s complimentary personal assistant ticket requires you to email a scanned copy of your PIP or DLA award to the event. Not a Blue Badge, not a CredAbility card. Your benefits paperwork, sent to an events inbox. I understand why organisers ask for proof. I would still rather not have to disclose my award letter to get somebody in to help me walk across a field.

The second is a sentence on their own visitor page. Because the event is held on the lawns, they strongly recommend that disabled visitors are accompanied by a companion.

I went on my own.

I understand what that sentence is doing. It is being honest about the terrain, and honesty about terrain is exactly what I spend my time asking organisers for. But read it as a disabled person deciding whether to buy a ticket, and it does not read as information. It reads as a warning that this is not designed with you in mind, and a fair number of people will get to that line and close the tab.

The terrain is a real challenge. It is not a barrier. Those are different things, and the sentence collapses them into one.

Going Anyway, At a Serious Rate

I have been chewing on Fergus Walkinshaw’s answer ever since.

I do not believe it. Not literally. Nobody restarts a company under one of the most scrutinised names in British motorsport, engineers a supercharged V12 out of a thirty-year-old Jaguar, and finds it broadly straightforward. There will have been weeks in there that were nothing but problems.

What I think he was actually telling me is that he does not count them. When the thing you are building is the thing you would be doing anyway, the obstacles do not get filed as obstacles. They get filed as Tuesday. The problems are still there, they are just not what he is looking at, and after a while they stop being the story you tell about your own work.

I recognise that, and I suspect a lot of people reading this will too. It is the difference between a day that was difficult and a day that was ruined, and it is very nearly the whole argument this publication exists to make.

Blenheim on grass, in September, with a lot of ground to cover and nobody with me, was a challenge. The score above says so, and the physical navigation mark reflects this. I would do it again tomorrow.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

Ghandi noticed how I was experiencing a car and adjusted, without ceremony and without asking me a single awkward question, and handed me a morning I will still be talking about in ten years. Nobody could have promised me that in advance, and no access statement could have contained it.

Go, and go on a dry week. Take somebody if you want somebody, and go on your own if you would rather. Walk the club lawns before the gates open, because that part is included with your ticket and almost nobody bothers.

And if a car starts moving, stop and let it come past you. That is the bit they cannot put in a photograph.

All accessibility details in this article were verified against the organiser’s published information at the time of writing. This reflection is based on my personal experience on the day. Individual experiences may vary, and none of the points raised are intended as a judgement of the event itself, but as an honest account of how I navigated it with my own access needs.