A potentially worrying trend

Car meetings – evening pub meets, Sunday morning coffee shop gatherings, cruises – they’re all part of the classic car scene fabric.

For decades owners and enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds have met, talked cars, maybe gained inspiration or impetus or ideas and gone home, usually looking forward to the next one. These meetings are great levellers, bringing people together with their love of old and older cars.

But something has been happening in the classic car gatherings scene and while so far it’s almost miniscule it sets a worrying precedent of how things could end.

Wokery, it seems, has started to catch up with classic meetings, events, shows. And while it should be regarded as laughable, it’s not. A fortunately small number of event organisers have decided to go down the ‘be kind’, ‘be inclusive’ route.

Hold on, what was that? Be kind? Be inclusive? Here in the Classic Collective we’ve not come across bigotry, racism, intolerance at a classic event. And each of us in the Collective has at least 50 years of event-going under our belts, so we might just have an idea what we’re talking about.

Yet the way some organisers are acting you’d think all classic events are full of Confederate Flag-waving racist, sexist bigots.

But that’s far from the truth. As we said earlier, classic shows are truly great levellers and always have been. Even in those early-1980s days of the Chelsea Cruise there was no racism, snobbishness, bigotry. And since those heady jack-up kit, red light under the back axle, slot mags days one thing hasn’t changed: friendliness, not forgetting support and enthusiasm. It’s still there, big-time.

So what’s going on, and why do we ‘need’ wokery in classic events? Put simply, we don’t need it. But in what seems to have been a short time the “be kind” mantra has quietly started to move in, a bit like the way rust slowly grew around the wheelarches of a BMC ‘Farina’.

To those who attend many shows, meetings, events, they’d never been aware of bigotry in car shows. They met fellow enthusiasts, talked to them. Like being in the pub you can’t get on with everybody, that’s just how things are.

But to continuously adopt that “be kind” stance gets the whole scene absolutely nowhere. The Special’s Classic Collective firmly believes if event organisers go looking for bigotry or bother when there isn’t any it will do nothing but harm. It could push away good enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds who simply won’t feel welcome when the woke monster raises its ugly head further and sticks its boney digits further into the UK classic car scene.

We don’t need wokery in classic events. We don’t need to be told how to think. We know what’s good and what’s bad. We’ll ask badly-behaved attendees, whether they’re being rude to other attendees or driving like morons, to leave. And we can police that ourselves.

So let’s carry on with our classic events as they are. Let’s meet more people, share stories of great journeys, laugh at tales of breakdown woes and poorly-executed bodges, and share the emotion of the discovery and ownership of our dream machines.

It’s not bloody difficult, is it?