Sunday the 28th of April 2019 marks the first time I went to a full on Bicester Heritage event, the Sunday Scramble. I was up there for a company called Howson Media (@howsonmedia on Instagram) who are the photographers/videographers based in the Heritage site meaning that my shots would be uploaded to the Bicester Heritage Instagram page (@bicesterheritage on Instagram), both the story and main feed. My dad and I made the roughly 2 hour journey to Bicester the night before the scramble to make sure we could be there with decent time in the morning, after the journey the owner of Howson Media had prepared us a room at his family's B&B so we hit the deck shortly after our arrival.
At 6 AM the alarm went off signifying that it was time to get ready and leave for a classic car kind of day at Bicester Heritage. So after our slight detour to the Co-op to pick up some breakfast snacks, we head into the Heritage site where, even though the public cars hadn't been let in yet, there was already some incredible cars on display. Once we got to the office we had a quick catch up with Jimmy Howson and then head out with our cameras to have a look at what was on display!
The stretch from the office down to the gate is probably no longer than 100 metres with a few companies along the way, such as Classic Performance Engineering (@classicperformanceengineering on Instagram) who had a lovely Jaguar E-Type Lightweight sat outside their building. That stretch of road took us at least 30 minutes to get down due to the amount of cars; taking pictures and chatting to owners of cars (who were all very nice and talkative). It was very lucky that we managed to get to the entrance when we did as a very nice Ferrari F40 came cruising in, a car which I didn't see for the rest of the event!
We then wandered on round to Sports Purpose (@sportspurpose on Instagram) after passing a pristine Ferrari 328GTS. Sports Purpose is up there with one of my favourite specialists at Bicester Heritage as they deal with some of the nicest Porsches, from the standard 356A to the 964 Carrera RS and the building that they store the cars in fits the period and styling of the cars amazingly! After having a very good look at all the Porsches (and the casual Jaguar XJR-12 sat there) we head back to the office to offload the pictures and quickly edit the shots that had been taken.
As we were prepping to leave again, the office mascot arrived in the shape of an original Group 4 Rally Lancia Stratos, complete with Ferrari Dino engine and all! The noise, shape, livery and all just screamed classic 70's and it was very nice to see a real one as opposed to the replicas that become more and more common but it's no surprise that the replicas are more common considering the real deal sits at around £700,00!
We then walked round the back of the office to Pendine Historic Cars (@pendinehistorics on Instagram) which had something very special waiting for us, a Group C Nissan NPT 90 of which roughly 10 were ever built. Tucked away with the iconic Nissan there was also an Aston Martin DBR4 and a Porsche 911E.
Just outside of Pendine was the Douze Coupes Autos (@douzecoupes on Instagram) Alfa Romeos which showed off an incredible modern 'patina' making them look much like rat-rods but in a very Italian way. After the Alfas it was time to go check out some very classic Bentleys at Kingsbury Racing (@kingsburyracing on Instagram) where they had some very nice work-in-progress cars that were busy being built. Then we carried on just being stunned by almost everything that we saw, but one of the cars that stunned us the most was the Ferrari 288GTO in one of the car parks, seeing any of the Ferrari Hyper 5 is always an occasion, let alone when it's the very first! There's something about the 288GTO which just makes it feel so special, luckily we got there just before it left so we got to hear it roar into life as the glorious V12 engine got running and despite us not being too close to the entrance, it was definitely audible on it's way out! Now it was time to check out Heritage F1 (@heritagef1 on Instagram) where they had a Toleman T185 with the engine exposed waiting for us, I do love to see classic F1 cars as they really represent a much different (and louder) era of racing that could've been lost through the years of development, alongside the Toleman was a work-in-progress Lancia Stratos fitted with an Alfa Romeo V6 engine which looked like it'd be a lot of fun once it's up and running! One of the last places we checked out was the Hagerty Classic Car Insurance (@hagertyclassiccarsuk on Instagram) Hanger which was filled with amazing classics from Ford Escort Mexicos to BMW Z1s and just about everything classic in-between.
It was then time to head back to the office, grab some food and edit some pictures and chat with Jimmy about our first event there, as well as trying to answer some very difficult questions such as F40 or F50, which would you have? But all-in-all it was an incredible day, I got to meet some awesome people like Oli (@officialmumbo on Instagram) and Adrian (@benzinafilms on Instagram) as well as seeing some incredible cars with equally incredible price tags! Thankyou to Bicester Heritage and Howson Media for having me up to shoot this amazing event!
Have you ever been to a Bicester Heritage event? What was your favourite car? Let me know via @parkers_pics19 on Instagram.
Thanks for reading!