Never before has a £400 Vauxhall Astra Mk3 won a concours outright, but the Festival of the Unexceptional is no ordinary car show
WORDS JON BURGESS PHOTOGRAPHY JON BURGESS/HAGERTY
“I didn’t expect this at all, I’m still taking it in. I wasn’t going to enter, but my pals talked me into it, and the car got in. I was over the moon, and then it won… It’s unreal.”
Concours de l’Ordinaire winner Sam Allan’s Vauxhall Astra Merit was once the very definition of street furniture – the sort of car most concours d’élégance entrants would have ignored as they left the show in their Pourtout-bodied Delages. Hagerty’s Festival of the Unexceptional, now in its eighth iteration, aims to redress the balance, promoting the cars that were once everywhere, but are now nowhere to be found – cars that, to mangle a phrase from Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, were worthy of the background.
Some 50 humble survivors were selected for concours appraisal; any run-of-the-mill car qualified, provided it was built between 1967 and 1997. A Ford Ka and Renault Mégane Scénic appeared on the lawn for the first time, alongside storied British entries including the last-known Morris Marina built, and an ex-Royal Mail Austin Maestro City 500 van – one that was unfortunately stolen a day after restoration and used in a ram-raid.
The fastest and flashiest classics have events of their own in which they and their owners attend. The Festival of the Unexceptional, which took place in the grounds of Lincolnshire’s Grimsthorpe Castle on 30 July, has its focus firmly on the loss-leaders that propped up the other end of the range.
Allan, a 31-year-old driving instructor from Edinburgh, spotted his winning Astra, a 1.4-litre, 59bhp base model, parked across from his valeting business in 2012. Owned via a Motability scheme by an elderly gentleman who garaged and waxed it, the car got his attention.
As time passed, he noticed that the Astra had been sitting on the man’s drive for 18 months without moving. “I was a geek, and looked up the MoT history,” he said. “I knew it was low-mileage [34,000], so I wrote a polite note and put it through his door, asking if he might sell. He rang back an hour later, delighted, and after a few months I bought it for £400.” That was in June 2019, and since then the Astra has needed little more than a new battery, a CV boot and a polish. “Remarkably, for a Scottish car that’s lived there all of its life, it has never been welded, and doesn��
