Nobody Was Trying to Sell Me Anything: Concourse of Elegance, Hampton Court Palace

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Gentle challenge

Every September the Concours of Elegance goes past on my phone. Photographs of cars I will never see in the flesh, lined up on a lawn at Hampton Court, and every year the same quiet decision. Lovely. Not for me.

Nothing to do with steps or trains. It was the room I had built in my head. Tudor brickwork, a dress code, cars that arrive by invitation, champagne before lunch. I am a blind man who is not going to be buying a Bugatti, and I had already played the afternoon through. Polite nods. Nobody actually rude. Six hours of being slightly in the way.

I have never been more wrong about anything I have written about this year.

Nothing Is Roped Off

The first thing you notice, and it takes about a minute, is that there is nothing between you and any of it.

Go to a motor show and the good cars sit up on plinths behind a rope with somebody in a lanyard nearby, at a distance an insurer has calculated on your behalf. At Hampton Court they sit on gravel in the palace gardens with a small card on the ground giving the year, and that is the whole of the arrangement. No cordon. No stanchion. No polite arm across the chest.

I stood next to a Bugatti Type 57 close enough to lean on it. Nobody came over. Nobody was watching to see whether I would.

That matters more to me than it might to you. At fifteen feet a car is a rumour. At two feet it becomes a shape, and the shape arrives through your body rather than your eyes: the height of a wing against your own hip, the length of a bonnet as you walk it, the way the sound of gravel closes up as you come alongside something solid. Put a rope there and all of that goes. I lose the car entirely and I am left holding somebody else’s description of it.

I had assumed the rope was the price of admission to an event like this. It turns out the rope is what you get at events that are protecting an asset. This is not one of those.

What the Concours Actually Is

It started in 2012, sixty cars in the Quadrangle at Windsor Castle for the Diamond Jubilee. It went to St James’s Palace, came to Hampton Court, headed north to Holyroodhouse, went back to Windsor, and has been at Hampton Court since 2017. This was the fifteenth.

Cars come by invitation only. There is no judging panel. Best in Show is decided by the owners themselves, each voting for a car that is not their own, and the winner takes away a silver Pegasus. Even the number of cars is oddly slippery. The organisers say sixty, their own event page says eighty, the map in the catalogue numbers seventy, and on the Friday morning they posted that more than eighty had come through the gates.

On paper this ought to be the most closed room in British motoring. Invitation-only entries, a hundred and twelve pounds to get in on the Friday, a palace, a dress code, Fortnum’s picnics on the lawn.

There is money everywhere, and there is a certain amount of flexing, and I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. But that is not what the day is made of.

The Crowd

What exclusivity actually does at the Concours is filter, and what it filters for is not wealth. It is knowledge.

Everybody there had gone out of their way to be there, and gone out of their way for the cars specifically. Nobody had drifted in because it was on and the weather was decent. What that leaves you with is a lawn full of people who know a great deal and want to talk about it, which is a completely different atmosphere from a lawn full of people who want to be seen.

Niall was on the CoinJar stand, and he called me over and offered me a coffee before I had said a word. CoinJar is a crypto exchange and one of the event’s partners, and it is exactly the sort of stand I would have walked past on the entirely sensible basis that I was never going to be a customer. We talked about the business for a bit. Then we talked, properly, about accessibility at events, which he had clearly been thinking about long before I turned up.

At One of One I met Connor, who was on the stand for a company that rebuilds Land Rovers one at a time, each one for a single owner. He was so enthusiastic about the work that it stopped feeling like a stand at all. We ended up on the Goodwood Revival. It was the sort of conversation you have with a mate rather than the sort you have with a brand. If you see them there, go and say hello.

Russell and a colleague on the Turnbull & Asser stand gave me chocolate and champagne and about five very lively minutes on driving gloves, which is not a subject I had expected to enjoy and did.

At the Bentley stand I met a woman who was extraordinarily kind with her time. I did not quite catch her name, and I think it was Nirvani, and if it was not I apologise to her, because she deserves to be named properly. She spent ages taking me through the cars, and then took me to the new Supersports, which was the one I had gone hoping to find: the first Continental GT to drive its rear wheels only, with the hybrid system and the back seats taken out to get the weight down. She invited me to come and see Jack Barclay in Mayfair once the refit is finished.

Not one of those was a sales conversation. Nobody was working out whether I was worth their afternoon. This was not people showing off their cars. It was people sharing the fact of being among some of the rarest and greatest engineering ever built, which is a thing you can share out loud with a stranger, and which does not require either of you to be able to afford any of it.

I have been to a lot of events this year. This is the one where I felt most like I belonged.

Why Have You Never Knocked?

Then they showed me the Ducati.

It is a Desmosedici from the end of 2011, and it was Valentino Rossi’s. Not a replica, not a repaint. Ducati built five of them, for Rossi and Nicky Hayden alone, after Rossi told the factory to abandon the carbon frame it had spent millions developing. This was the bike he tested it all on: Mugello that September, Valencia that November, the day after the season ended.

In between those two tests, Simoncelli was killed. At Valencia, with every camera in the sport pointing at him, Rossi put Simoncelli’s 58 above his own 46. The bike still carries it. A great fluorescent 46 and, tucked into the corner of it, a small 58.

I stood next to a bike ridden by the greatest of all time, on gravel, in a garden, with nobody telling me to step back.

The Yellowbird That Isn’t Yellow

The first car video I ever watched was a RUF on the Nürburgring.

RUF made the film themselves at the end of the eighties to sell the company, and it has long outlived whatever they wanted out of it. Their test driver, Stefan Roser, laps the Nordschleife with the steering wheel pointing almost anywhere except straight on, tyres smoking through corners most people would take tidily, in a little over eight minutes. There is a passenger. I have often wondered what he was paid.

The car in that film got its name by accident. In 1987 Road & Track hired Volkswagen’s test track for a feature on the world’s fastest cars, put nine of them out on it including two Porsche 959s, a Testarossa and a Countach, and the RUF beat the lot at 211mph. It was yellow. Somebody on the magazine said it went past like a yellow bird, and the name stuck hard enough that RUF took it as their own.

At an event where the highest honour goes to whichever car looks best, the one I had come to find is named after a colour it has never worn.

Exhausts Through the Bonnet

I had a lot of toy cars as a boy. Dozens of the small ones and only a handful of the bigger models, and one of those I kept long after I had stopped keeping anything.

A Mercedes SSK. Silver body, blue wings. What fixed it was a detail that made no sense to me at all. The exhausts came out of the bonnet. Not from underneath, not out of the back, but straight out through the side of the bonnet, as though it had been assembled by an adult with nobody supervising. I could hold the thing in both hands and still not believe there had ever been a real one.

At Hampton Court I stood inches away from one.

Chassis 36246 was built in 1928 and written down on its own invoice as a racing car. It was delivered to Argentina, where Carlos Zatuszek and his brother-in-law finished second in the 500 Miles of Argentina and then won the Córdoba Grand Prix twice over, and it went on racing out there until 1958. It has a supercharger you bring in by shoving the accelerator past the end of its travel, which is not a decision anybody would sign off today. And the exhausts do come out through the bonnet.

According to the catalogue it had never been shown in Britain before.

So the answer to the question I could not settle when I was eight is yes. It took ninety-eight years and a palace lawn to get it.

If you think you have seen it all, a day here will tell you that you have not.

Getting There, and the Ground Underfoot

The journey is about as easy as a major event gets. Hampton Court station sits a five-minute walk from the palace gate, in zone 6, with trains from London Waterloo every half hour and Oyster accepted on the route. There is no Underground station, and the nearest ones are a bus ride away at Wimbledon or Richmond.

The site itself is flat and step-free between the displays, and almost all of it is gravel.

The gravel is the thing to know before booking. Walking on it is no trouble, the stones are small and loose rather than deep, and I watched somebody on a mobility scooter get round without breaking stride. Narrow wheels are another matter, and anyone pushing themselves in a manual chair on thin tyres should expect to be working for it. Historic Royal Palaces is straight about this in its own guidance: broadly flat gardens, but gravel, uneven ground and the odd slope, with smoother tarmac only in the Wilderness, the Rose Garden and the Kitchen Garden.

Food was plentiful and cost a good deal less than I had braced for, which given where I was standing came as a surprise.

The Concours publishes nothing at all about access. Its FAQ page carries a single link, to Historic Royal Palaces’ page about trains and car parks, and that page says nothing whatever about the event site. Not the gravel, not the distances, not where the accessible toilets sit in relation to the display. Everything that worked for me on Friday worked because of how individual people behaved, and not one bit of it was something I could have found out beforehand.

Final Reflection: Accessible Challenge in Action

On the train home I sat behind someone finishing off a phone call about their day. Properly super, they said. Such a fun day, and they had met so many wonderful people. I could not have put my own afternoon better.

The score above is high because almost nothing about the day was hard. That is unusual for this publication and it deserves saying plainly. The one thing worth marking down is that the ease was not designed. It came from a site that happens to be flat, a format that happens to have no barriers in it, and a set of people who happened to be generous. Somebody with different needs, reading the Concours website before booking, would find nothing to tell them any of that.

The barrier I had spent years believing in was never in the gardens at all. It was mine. I built it out of a dress code and a ticket price and a set of photographs on a phone screen, and I never once went to look. That is not a barrier an organiser can remove for you.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

If you have decided a concours is not for you, I would gently suggest you have decided it on the same evidence I had, which is none. Go and stand next to something you have only ever seen in photographs, and see who talks to you.

London Concours is at the Honourable Artillery Company from 8 to 10 June next year. I am going. If you go too, I would love to hear how you found it.

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.