Wilton near Salisbury is the ancestral home of
Veyron-owning petrolhead
Lord Pembroke. It is a fabulous place, like Goodwood in miniature. Miniature being very much a relative term, of course. The gardens and buildings are arguably even more attractive than those on offer at Lord March’s gaff.
For those arriving by car, getting in there at 10:30am on Supercar Sunday and out again at the end of the day was reminiscent of pre-bypass Silverstone. Two or three operatives with lollipops and hi-viz trousers strove manfully to make some sense of it all. Your reporter sensibly went on his motorbike and had no trouble.
Once you’re in though it’s smashing. A £20 day entry (£50 for a family) seems almost good value when set against the impoverishing cost of a Silverstone GP ticket. There’s a very relaxed feel to it all, there are some utterly wonderful classic car tableaux and displays, and the prices for food and drink (good local ales) are nearly sensible too.
Where Wilton can’t compete with Goodwood of course is on action. There’s no track there, so PistonHeads-style activity has to be confined to the space available. This year, Supercar Sunday was marked by a group of daring young men on motocross bikes flying through the air with their legs hanging out behind, and a slow but certainly not quiet parade of supercars whose owners were interviewed by Tiff Needle (sic).
The Bristol Fighter, or Firefighter as Tiff called it, was the quietest on the mic exhaust test, and almost certainly the rarest on show too with only nine made. Its owner was very happy with the car having been prompted into the purchase by his good lady wife. With Bristol once again scheduled to
rise again
out of various piles of ashes, and a state of the art garage already in place at Brentford for servicing, the Fighter could yet be a good investment. It was certainly an oasis of mechanical calm in an otherwise very shouty group of 120 decibel-plus hypertackle.
All the usual supercar suspects were there, but it was interesting to note that although pride of place in the procession was given to the Porsche 918, LaFerrari and Macca P1, most of the public adoration was reserved for the genuinely stunning and jewel-like Pagani Huayra and the carbon-fibre madness that is the Koenigsegg One:1. This intimidating beast has a claimed potential (on the right fuel) to match its 1,360 kilo weight in horsepower. Certainly the post-blip sound of the clearly massive turbos slowly spinning down, plus the exotic whiff of unburnt who-knows-what coming out of the exhaust, were both suggestive of very serious power. The P1 and 918 looked almost dull alongside it, like Golfs. If you’re going big, then go really big. And that’s the One:1.