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SOUTH EAST PAST EVENTS

SUNDAY 9th MAY RAVENSWOOD SCHOOL CLASSIC AND SPORTS CAR SHOW

The Ravens Wood American and Classic Car show was held just six days after the visit to Brands Hatch, and guess what? It didn’t stop raining all week.

Surprisingly, we had to ask for a little more support to attend this show. Although the show is not the best known on the car show circuit it is well known locally. There is a large number of club members living within a 10-mile radius of Bromley so it was rather disappointing that those local members did not volunteer to support the club at this show. Thankfully, Dave Leyland, Karl Thomas, Michael Gray, Peter Mason and Kelly, all from far afield offered their support and joined Steve Kingsnorth and myself to present a fine display of cars even though that included an Omega and a Corsa!

Fortunately the rain had finally stopped on the Saturday. On Sunday morning we all met at the Little Chef on the A21 near Farnborough before proceeding to the show. There were some concerns before hand that the playing fields where the show is usually held would be water logged and that the cars would be stranded in mud. However, when we arrived everyone was directed onto the hard standing surfaces where we found our club-pitch on the tennis courts, the organizers had done really well considering on Wednesday they had ducks swimming on the playing fields!

Having settled ourselves in and set up the club banner we found ourselves tightly squeezed in between the RX7 club and some Yank cars with a couple of Rover P5’s in front of us. We were glad to see that Dave Leyland has finally managed to repair his dented front wing, the damage being inflicted on last years Brighton Run, well done Dave its only taken you a year! Michael showed his very clean 1B coupe in light metallic blue and Karl presented his 1B coupe in red. With my red T bar and Steve’s Special Edition Supercharger on show all the cars looked really nice. Well done lads. There was the usual interest during the day. I even let a young lad sit in my car so that he could have his photo taken in it. It’s those sort of moments that make you proud to own one of these cars. We also met Roger Hexter from Beckenham whom we had met at the same show last year. He was showing his prize winning Reliant GTE and he has just completed restoration of a Mk1 MR2 and asked to join the club. Welcome Roger, it will be interesting talking to you later.

Despite this being a local show there was a very large turn out of all sorts of different cars from a vintage Roll Royce to a concours MGB. Of particular interest were the large collection Custom and Hot Rod cars that I have never really looked at before. There were some truly monster machines on display with massive chrome plated engines. A truly amazing sight and I thought to myself they’d look good in the MR2.

A big thanks to all those who came to support this charity event which raised £4,500 for school equipment.

Alan Cayzer.