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Gaydon Meeting
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The first UK club meeting of 2001 was a visit to the British
Heritage Centre at Gaydon, Warwickshire on Sunday 11 February. Seven cars
made the effort, despite grey, cold weather which made even the Cotswolds look
rather bleak, and did nothing to encourage top-down motoring. All the tops may
have been down for this photo, but a couple (who shall remain nameless)
went back up before we drove to the pub!
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We allowed a couple of hours to visit the museum and this was more than
enough to establish that it was a Fiat-free zone - indeed I don't recall seeing
any Italian cars there all
The museum is well laid out in a very impressive
building, but some of the cars are not particularly interesting, and some are in
original (i.e. poor) condition There were plenty of cars from BMC/British Leyland/Rover,
but most of the sports cars had Triumph, MG or Austin Healey badges
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The Land Rover heritage was very
obvious as soon as you entered the gates and saw the off-road course in
the museum grounds
The museum contained a large variety of Land Rovers,
Freelanders, Discoveries and and Range Rovers - including many in
various states of
disassembly
Someone has had a lot of fun cutting cars, engines, gearboxes
etc in half and painting and polishing everything for display!
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Highlights for
me were these record breaking MGs and the turbine powered Rover BRM that ran at
Le Mans. Some of the older veteran cars were interesting, and it was fun to see the first and last
mini side by side
Now that Land Rover is part of Ford, it would be nice to think that they will
find room for makes like Aston Martin and Jaguar in the future. The museum could
also be improved by a few cars from Lotus, Caterham, Morgan and TVR, and how
about some cars from the smaller firms like Marcos and Ginetta…
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The museum staff are friendly, and very keen to support car clubs, and many
clubs start and end their scenic drives at Gaydon. Most of
the events on their calendar feature British car clubs, but I couldn’t help
noticing these pictures of a MX-5 meeting held there last September – with 400
cars arranged by colour in the rain!
I assume they didn't all go off for a scenic drive together though... |
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The museum currently has a special display of
Williams Formula one cars, which makes an interesting contrast to the rest
of the museum |
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From Gaydon, we drove through some very attractive Cotswold villages to Sibford
Gower where we had Sunday lunch booked at the Moody
Cow. As with the sister
restaurant at Ross on Wye which the club visited last year, the setting was
beautiful, the welcome warm and the food superb. If we had a criticism, it was
that the portions were rather too large for comfort, so most people gave up well
before the puddings …
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©Geoff Bowles on behalf of the UK
barchetta Owners Club 2001
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