Bay to Birdwood – Day 5 – Finish Festival

Once participants have finished the Bay to Birdwood route, the event is not over.   Next there is the finish festival.   All the cars participating line up in the expansive grounds of the National Motoring Museum in Birdwood.

Not all cars participating in the Bay to Birdwood participate, but most seem to.   it is also possible to buy separate tickets for this event.   As you finish the event, you are handed your grille badge and then those participating in the Finish Festival are sent over to the side to park.   We got into trouble moving off to the side to let our group assemble.

Ultimately we all got in and lined our cars up with everyone else in the general category.   Unlike most of these type of events, the food was actually pretty decent.   We had plenty of time to explore the finish festival, as well as the National Motoring Museum.

The festival includes awards not only for cars in to be judged, but fashion that best aligns with the car.   I saw some quite good entrants there.   Some of the pre-war cars in particular give great opportunity for period dress.

Just the finish festival alone would probably one of the best show and shine events I’ve been to.   So when you couple the whole Bay to Birdwood experience together, it really makes this event something special.

I especially liked looking at the huge variety of pre-war cars on display.   I sometimes wonder what will become of these cars in the future.  The average owner is quite elderly, they are maintenance intensive and require specialist skills.   However, I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few younger people driving them.

As I walked past the huge variety of pre-war cars, it made me think that any one of these cars would steal the show at a regular cars and coffee, yet at his event there were so many you could spend hours looking at them.

Not all of them were perfect and I think that is great.  What is important is that they participated in the event.   There was even one that had a regular garden tap as its radiator mascot.

Seeing the rest of the cars was pretty good too.  There were three other W116’s that I noticed.   Two 280SEs and a 280SEL.  All of them were in pretty good shape.

As well as the huge variety of cars on display, there was also free access to the Museum. I will cover this separately.   Our group had originally planned to leave at 1430, but given we had seen everything, most of our group were keen to leave a bit early so we could get to Loxton a bit earlier, so we rolled out at about 1400.  It had been a great day.