Last weekend I went to the 2026 Festival of the Unexceptional, held as ever in the stately surroundings of Grimsthope Castle in Lincolnshire. The event, generously sponsored by Hagerty, a motor insurance firm, has been going since 2014 and it’s the antidote to those posh car concours d’elegance, at say, Goodwood, Paris and Pebble Beach, opulent, champagne-drenched affairs ram-packed with Porsches, Delahayes, Ferraris, Bentleys and Bugattis. Nice as all that stuff can be, it’s sterile, almost literally.
The Festival of the Unexceptional is the kind of place where folk get more excited at spotting a mint 30-year-old Skoda pick-up, a four-wheeled Reliant, a Datsun Sunny, defiantly still in one piece, or a faded and rusty Chrysler Alpine. These were mundane, boring, deeply unspecial cars in their day, not truly “classics” by most definitions, derided by snobs, mostly once commonplace and now forgotten. But not quite at “Fotu”, as the aficionados call it.
