2026 British Car Show Sydney

Last week was the annual British Car Show in Sydney.   Its always my favorite car show of the year.  There are a few reasons for that.  It has a size and scale that few other shows can match.  It has such variety, and many extremely rare and interesting cars.  Rare doesn’t need to mean expensive either.  These days you’re more likely to see an Aston Martin DB5 than a Jowett.  I like seeing cars like the latter.

The show seemed a bit quieter than last year, perhaps back to what it was on the first year it was held at Hawkesbury Showground.  I’m not sure why that was, as it was a very warm day, hardly a cloud in the sky.

I took my Series 1 Daimler Double-Six Vanden Plas.  It is the first time I have displayed the car at the British car show.  In prior years I have taken my E-Type.  This year the JDCA display was pretty good, although it did seem a little smaller.  There is normally a large lineup of E-Types, but this year it was less than half of what it was last year.  I guess I contributed to that.   Probably the strongest display was the classic XKs, with great examples of nearly all the models.

Mark 2s and XJS were also quite well represented.  There was a single Mark 1, and a couple of 420s, including a Daimler Sovereign, but strangely no original S-Types.

I was parked in the section with the XJs.  It was a bit odd as it was the older XJs like mine, plus the new ones, except for the two XJ40s that were parked elsewhere.  I think it would probably better to have the Series XJs parked together, and then the modern ones like the X300 parked together.   But that is only a small thing.  There were a couple of nice series 1s, including one with a manual gearbox.  Probably the most impressive was the Series 2 XJ12 in brown.

As usual the other marques were well represented.  The RROC had a very nice display, as did the Triumph club.   I was a bit disappointed in what was on display in the Rover section, which is always of interest to me. I would have liked to see some more cars.  In the RROC section, a couple of cars caught my eye, including a lovely blue Derby Bentley, and a Silver Shadow II in a vibrant greenish gold.

This year I noticed a number of quite nice classic British station wagons, including a rather lovely Triumph.  As usual this year there were good vendors selling spare parts, keychains, books and so on.  Food vendors were down from prior years, and the options were a little limited.

I took a lot of photos on the day, but I wasn’t especially happy with how many of them came out.   I don’t think the focus was the greatest, or avoiding glare.   Still, it is always good to capture the array of amazing cars on display.   Given how vibrant the British car industry once was, it is a shame there is not much left.   A good example being Jaguar no longer building cars, and its future looking uncertain.