Race Retro (including the Silverstone Auctions classic cars sale) returned in February 2023 after a hiatus of several years. In this video we head down to Stoneleigh Park and re-acquaint ourselves with Race Retro, and take a walk around the wide variety of classic cars for sale in the Silverstone Auctions hall.
Even if you're more of a road-car enthusiast than race-car fan, this video should be of interest - I tried to include as much as possible of the cars that I think viewers on the Old Classic Car channel would find of most interest.
Race Retro is a three-day event, Friday to Sunday, and we popped over on day two. The video begins with our arrival, we then head indoors and peruse the cars up for auction - as you'd expect given that this is primarily a historic motorsport show, many of the cars had a competition vibe to them, but there were also many wonderful old road cars up for grabs. We walked around them all, although my camera did throw a wobbly and some of the footage went AWOL, most of the cars of interest to us are included.
The highlight of the sale must be the whopping £596k (inc fees) commanded by a low-mileage Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500, although my focus was on the older entries in the main. My shortlist of favourites in the sale included a wonderful Bristol 400 in maroon, and a rakish Ghia 450SS Spyder from 1967. There was also a staggering assortment of Lotus Elans with very well-known first owners (eg Peter Sellers, Jochen Rindt etc), to see them all together before being sold off was truly a unique opportunity. My thanks to the staff at Silverstone Auctions for allowing us to feature their classic car auction in this video, I'd definitely like to feature more auction entries like this in future.
Following the auction overview we then made our way to the two main Race Retro halls. Here, suppliers of race car parts, car upgrades and tuning equipment rubbed shoulders with purveyors of motoring memorabilia and artwork. Dotted around were static exhibits of road and competition-bred cars, including the wonderful new-build BRM V16, Bugatti Type 59, various rally cars (the Daimler Conquest definitely had vibes of Monte Carlo rallies in the early 1950s) and more.
We then headed off outside to the rally car demonstration areas, where a number of spectacular classic cars were being exercised - Minis, examples of Triumph Dolomite Sprint and 2.5 saloon, Volvo Amazon, Midgets, Hillman Imp, Austin 1800 and Maxi, Datsun 240Z (great sound) and more were to be found. Compared to our last visit in 2019, the re-worked outside viewing areas at Race Retro 2023 seemed to be a great improvement, quite an achievement given that HS2 cuts across part of the Stoneleigh site.
If you're new to the channel, thanks for looking in - when you're finished here please take a look around the rest of the content, much of it is related to classic cars on the road but mixed in are items of motorsport interest, including visits to various VSCC events (Prescott, Loton Park etc) and Goodwood, plus a video that features the V16 BRM in action.
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