4th Vintage Revival Montlhéry
The Vintage Revival has become a firm favourite with our club members. This year’s meeting was particularly poignant. Pete Clews had been looking forward to the event but didn’t quite make it. Ian Hughes took Pete’s racing F-Type to the circuit to fulfill a promise to Pete.
Jon Mark was there too and we thank him for his words and photos.
From Jon Mark:
The Vintage Montlhéry event has been on my ‘one to do’ list for a few years now, and we finally managed to plan a visit as part of our annual Morgan orientated holiday this year.
Our overall plan was to spend a few days travelling down through Holland, Belgium and France, spend the weekend at Montlhéry and then a steady return back north visiting some ‘must do’ places taking a total of two weeks. Why start in Holland ? I here you say, well Pauline has always wanted to visit the famous Tulip gardens at Keukenhof, and I have to admit if you have even the slightest interest in gardening, plants or landscaping then your reaction once through the queues will be ‘wow’.
After a southern detour to stay at the famous Hotel de France which was and indeed still is associated with many famous English race teams using it as a base for the Le Mans 24 hours event, we finally arrived at Montlhéry. The circuit is still almost as it was built with the Banking sections intact, although the organisers had introduced some additional chicanes to stop cars running at full chat.
There was a very varied range of cars, motorbikes and propelled contraptions, from pre 1940 running in various classes over the two days in weather which for the most part was pretty cool & drizzly. However in the final sessions on Sunday encouraged by a drying track some of the entrants were clearly ‘giving it some’ to keep high up the banking.
Later as the event wound down the organisers kindly let our visiting group of Morgans drive a few laps of the circuit behind a pace car, we were not allowed to venture higher than lane two and the pace was fairly sedate but it surprised both of us how ‘banked’ it was even at that point, I would love to drive or passenger a car at racing speed high up the banking, but for Pauline it’s a ‘no thanks’.
For myself & Pauline we both liked the informal atmosphere, low level corporate intervention, and interesting vehicles and would recommend it’s worth the trip, we also extended our stay afterwards in the Town and used it as a base to visit Paris (by train) and the famous Palace of Versailles, then during the few days taken to travel north through France we called at the WW1 Somme Museum, the La Couple V2 rocket base and the town of Montreuil all of which we can recommend too.
