Brooklands Museum Auto Italia May Day bank holiday weekend and Brooklands Museum were having their Auto Italia day, a celerbration of Italian cars and motorcycles. It's apparently one of Brooklands' biggest events of the year, so even Judith's Club membership wasn't sufficient to get us in for free (although it did only cost a fiver).
Crowds We arrived at about 9am and there were already a lot of people there. To the credit of the Brooklands' staff that were organising the traffic, we were barely delayed at all on our way into the spectator car park (although next time we must remember that there's a special parking area for Brooklands Club Members). There was a very long queue of Italian cars waiting to get in to the site though.
Fiat 500 There were a lot of lovely, cute old Fiat 500s parked in amongst the planes.
Abarth 500 There were also an unbelievable number of Abarth 500s. Literally hundreds. And they were nearly all black or white.
Fiat Dino 2400 There were plenty of other Fiats. Lesser known perhaps, but no less interesting or pretty. Here's a Fiat Dino 2400.
Alfa Romeo GTV 1750
Lancia I negligently forgot to check what this is. Doh!Considering how thoroughly awful modern Lancias have been for years, it's especially impressive how wonderful many of their old cars are.
Maserati Merak There were quite a lot fo Maseratis too, although mainly the newer ones line you can see in the background of this photo.Here's a Maserati Merak like the one that Jeremy Clarkson wrecked on Top Gear. Surprisingly pretty in the metal.
Ferrari Dino Obviously there were a lot of Ferraris. We thought the Dino was probably the prettiest Ferrari there.
Ferraris Lots and lots of Ferraris. There were quite a lot of boring new ones, but also quite a lot of older and (in my opinion) prettier ones.There were a lot of Lamborghinis too, but very little from the pre-Diablo era so I didn't bother taking any photos of those. Lined up, pretty much everything they've built since 1990 looks very, very similar, so kudos to Ferrari for making many of their cars so distinctive.
Awesome There were lots of interesting oddities. Here's a Fiat 500 pulling a suitably tiny caravan. Brilliant.
Crowds By 11am it was well busy. And the Italian cars were still arriving (alhough I'm not sure how that SMART you can see queuing in the photo has snuck in!). They must have been queuing for ages! Goodness knows where they were parking.
Banking View The old race track is effectively the overflow car park and that was looking pretty full...
Banking View ...in both directions.
Workshop With this being a very busy premium event day, they'd even opened the workshop up on the hill. There's always interesting stuff in there.
Cobra An AC Cobra bodyshell (I think).
Mercedes World They were also allowing the cars to run laps on the Mercedes World test track. As you can see, a lot of people had wandered over to Mercedes World to watch that.Altogether a brilliant day out.