Stonham Barns Classic Car Show 2023 (part 1)

The last two car shows I hadn’t attended as the weather was supposed to be raining. My app said rain, my wife said rain so therefore it will rain and I wouldn’t go. The show in particular I was most hacked of about not going to was the Helmingham Hall show which is always a good show and I even pre-paid the £10 entrance fee, but as it’s for charity I didn’t mind. It threatened rain at our house but it didn’t and was a nice day and I ended up painting. I did hear from a friend who braved the day that there was rain for about half an hour at Helmingham. Not that I was glad it rained, but just because I could sort of justify it to myself that I didn’t go. Anyway the weather was due to be nice for the Sunday show, I got the bag packed on the Saturday night, I even tempted fate and put some sun creme in the bag!

The sun came up and stirred me awake as I forgot to pull the blinds down, then what seemed like five minutes later the alarm went of. I was greeted by broken clouds, the nice white ones and not the ominous really dark grey jobs. I got the car out and had a nice steady cruise up until I got to some speed restrictions of 50mph, where I slowed a little to abide by the restrictions. Low and behold some dick head lorry driver tried to push me along as I obviously was going much to slow for the inpatient idiot. At one point I couldn’t even see the lorry’s number plate due to his tailgating, which is a offence now in the UK. Nearing a turn right the traffic was busy to cross the junction and there was a queue, unfortunately the lorry driver had to wait, just like me which did make me smile.

The minor country roads are OK once you crossed the busy junction, but this time there was a traffic jam to get to the show about a mile away from the entrance, I sat in traffic for about forty minutes. Not ideal, and a couple of cars turned around in front of me and obviously decided not to attend. I eventually arrived at the venue and followed the other cars in. Bury Retro Car Club usually has a nice tarmac hard standing pitch every year which is great. This time there was the first cock up, although the barriers had the Bury Car Club sign hanging on it, the traders had seen the marked up on the floor and pitched up already by the time myself and the rest of the club turned up, about fifteen minutes after me. I asked where to park and the marshal had no idea and said to park up in front of one car also from the club waiting for some information. We decided to park in front of the stalls as they didn’t want to move.

The organiser found us about thirty minutes later and came up with a compromise to park by the white marque tent, it wasn’t ideal, but we agreed and parked up.

After we parked up and had another chat I decided to go of and take some photos. Throughout the day I took just over three hundred and seventy photos, of which I will use around three hundred and forty, so I will split this show into three posts. I have the Mart’s Car of the show in part three, and a runner up this time which I will share in part two’s post, it was a close run thing to choose. As usual this event had the official cars of the show which is totally corrupt, I will explain in part three.

This little field was in front of us and few cars hadn’t turned up at the time I wandered over.

The main field was the second cock up; they had arranged the cars in a couple of rows where they were parked bonnet to boot (hood to trunk) and the lines were a bit all over the place. So in no particular order as I was zig zagging the lines taking the photos. So in this show there is a number of rear end of car photos as you couldn’t get a good one from the front.

This volks wagon had a 2.5lt Subaru engine bolted in the back of it and sounded rather awesome as it pulled in.

One of favourite super cars was the Ferrari 308 and this was a great example. I could have picked this as my car of the show, but it’s just a bought Ferrari and they made thousands of them. Still a very pretty car to look at. The paint was badly swirled and could do with a really good detail and paint correction.

A few cars up was this Audi 1000 Saxomat which has two clutches, I had never seen one of these before, and very VW Beetle-esq for styling. The radiator was at the back of the engine bay.

This guy had a second Saab that he turned into a trailer during lock down for Covid! The guy had done a good job even matching the wheels.

The weather was playing games one minute it sunny then it cloudy, but at least it wasn’t raining. The cars were still coming in and the show was getting quite busy.