Peter’s been out and about this month – an ‘unexceptional’ car show was followed by a week in Scotland…
► As many of you probably know, my first job in motoring journalism was as an editorial assistant on Practical Classics which at the time (the mid-late 1980s) was at the forefront of the movement to bring into the classic car hobby some more mainstream cars and mass-market saloons; things like Hillman Minxes, BMC Farinas and sixties Ford saloons. Yep, it might well seem incredible now, but there was a time when acceptance as classics of cars like Ford Escorts and Cortinas which today are worth a fortune was by no means universal.
Yet – and I think that, 37 years on, I can reveal this – accepting cars like this wasn’t a universally-popular policy within the magazine’s editorial department. Indeed, there were influential elements within the team who saw it as part of their mission to take the magazine ‘upmarket’. For myself, I never really saw the rationale behind this – coverage of the more modest cars was, to use a phrase that was starting to become popular then, Practical Classics’‘unique selling point’, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why abandoning that to ape the policy of rivals that were suffering due to our success should even be considered. Fortunately, this was a view broadly shared by ‘management’, and overall, the checks and balances of Editors and working Directors each with a slightly different view worked very well and together made the magazine the huge success that it was.
Anyway, I was reminded of all this in early August when I attended the ‘2022 Festival of the Unexceptional’ – an event which sets out to celebrate and embrace the more modest cars of the past. This doesn’t really include many of the ‘controversial’ cars from the 1980s – pretty-much all of these are now accepted through age and rarity. Rather, it’s all about cars that occupy the same spot in the market now as Ford Anglias, Hillman Minxes, BMC Farinas and so on did back then. In other words, cars which were once-popular and which a lot of people will have fond memories of owning, driving and riding in, but which weren’t especially aspirational, and might not be at the forefront of technical innovation.
But I don’t think that matters – history can’t be cherry-picked, and cars like Montegos, Princesses, Renault 25s, Peugeot 405s and the numerous Italian and Japanese saloons which were on every street-corner in the 1990s and noughties but are now hardly ever seen are every bit as much a part of it as the Jaguars, BMW, Mercedes and so on – which despite being less plentiful then, generally survive in greater numbers now.
My favourite vehicle there was the Fiat 125 you see here – no, it’s not an FSO or Polski-Fiat; this one was the real original thing – a Fiat 125 of the type made between 1967 and 1
