One of the biggest car shows that I attend is this show, Helmingham Hall. The show was on the 4th August 2024, once again I had the pleasure of my good friend Craig (another total petrol head) to join me. The day was an early rise for Craig who had to travel from the next county to my house which was around forty minutes including his fuel stop. He assures me that he was within the speed limits all the way. We uncovered my car in the garage and packed our cool bags into the trunk along with his camera and chair. I set up the SatNav and backed the car out. We set off for the show and enjoyed a peaceful steady trip to the show, until we got to the usual traffic snarl up at the entrance. We wasn’t on the show stand like previous years so we had to park with the other private entrants in a field on the other side of the main driveway which goes up to the hall. We had a pretty good spot to be honest and parked up. The weather was looking good and the app promised to hold that way for the rest of the day.
As this is such a big show the event will have to be covered in two parts with a lot of photos on each. I took well into six hundred photos on the day. Some were unusable as I had managed to put my grubby fingers on the lenses on the back of my phone. Soft focus filter wasn’t what I was after.
We got the chairs out for little refreshment and a sit down before we summoned the energy to start the walk around this huge show. We decided to start on the stalls before they got busy. We needn’t have bothered as most of them were not car related. I was little gutted about that as I wanted to buy some 20W – 50 engine oil. But, I could buy some pot plants, hats or some home made jewellery and fudge! There was only one car related stall there which was for a alloy wheel refurb company, that was it.
We got to the main area at the front of the hall where you can pay the extra to park and get some afternoon tea in the cost of the entrance. These were the cars from that area.
As we were about to move onto the club stand field, a Countach could be heard arriving to join the area.
These are Craig’s photos of the same cars which are so much better than mine.
The Clubs stands didn’t seem to have the wow factor for some reason this year. There was some nice cars there, ironically on the stand that we normally park on.
Simply Mustangs stand was mainly the more modern iterations of the Mustang, with plenty of orange.
More of Craig’s photos of the club stands.
It was a busy day with cars parking up in the public car park throughout the day, and lots of people.
The display cars are split in to two halves either side of a main driveway up to the hall itself. Clubs stands to the left and the private entrants to the right. At the end of the club stands the the main drive way has an exhibition of cars that drive up and down. We stopped to watch the first showing which usually take around half hour or so.
Craig was taking a number of photo’s and messing around with photography settings, I’m not sure what it all meant to be honest, even though his explanation authoritative, it was toned down to his audience, me. He was trying to get the wheels moving while stopping the cars. It was nice to see the cars rolling and not driving at the same time. I could enjoy them, some where brutal sounding like the American muscle and the Aston Martin, the others were just poodling along enjoying the scenery .
After the exhibition runs we wandered into the privateer field where I had parked up, which we will cover in Part 2. There were much nicer cars on that side and plenty to look at.
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