Andrew Frankel: Big players can’t replace independents in Bicester boom 

I don’t know if you’re a regular at Bicester Heritage’s quarterly Sunday Scramble, but already it’s hard to imagine the season without it. If you’ve not been, all that happens is that around 10,000 people descend on the Bicester Heritage site, almost all of whose tenants open their doors and display their wares for people to look at. And that really is about it. Tickets are £20 (children under the age of 15 get in for £1.60), which may seem a lot given there is no actual ‘show’ but such is the variety of machinery exhibited, it’s not hard to see the value. The proof of the pudding is that customers vote with their feet, making sure each Scramble sells out long before the gates are opened.

Everyone is here from the cutting-edge McLaren Formula E and Extreme E teams to tiny workshops where men wearing aprons and overalls hit lumps of metal with hammers to turn them into beautifully constructed components for ancient automobiles. Even if all you did was park up in the big field where all the traffic is directed and spent a few hours just gazing at the cars around you, you’d hardly consider it time wasted.

I just hope those in charge find a way to retain the site’s immense charm. Now it is so well-known and highly regarded, increasingly big players are coming to Bicester (Volvo offshoot Polestar has just set up its UK base there and I hear rumours a significant Chinese OEM will do soon), and I know there are big plans for developing the site. Given the amount of space available, the potential is enormous. All of which is fine, so long as it is additional to, rather than instead of, all those small artisan workshops that made people flock to Bicester in the first place.

The need to take a short holiday means I’m writing these words rather earlier in the month than usual, before, indeed, the return of the Geneva Motor Show in late February. If any rabbits were pulled from any millinery on any manufacturer’s stand, forgive me for not referring to it here. What I do know however is which manufacturers are going, because the list has just been announced.

And of the major European players, Renault is going along with its Dacia subsidiary. Pininfarina has a stand and… that’s it. No one else is turning up. From America the Lucid EV start up is going and no more, from Japan only Isuzu is making the journey. By comparison the fact two major Chinese players, BYD and MG Motor are making the journey looks almost like overkill. Stand space must be going for a song.

You might have thought that given that Geneva was the only European show guaranteed to attract the cream of the world’s manufacturers and that it’s been off the calendar since 2019 they’d have been breaking down the doors of the Palexpo exhibition halls to get back in. But clearly that’s not the case. What’s happened?

“The traditional motor show exists in a state of decline”

Two things. First, as I’ve written about many times before, the traditional motor show is a relic of a bygone era and exists in a state of what I believe to be inexorable decline. But this alone does not explain entirely the global volte face from the world’s car manufacturers. What may explain the situation rather better is what happened when the 2020 show was cancelled three days before the doors opened.

It was cancelled only when the Swiss government announced a ban on gatherings of more than 1000 people thanks to the fast spread of Covid-19. And some have wondered whether the reason the show’s organisers waited so long until what many saw as entirely inevitable was because if it became impossible to stage the show for reasons that were beyond their control – government intervention for instance – that then gave them someone else to blame. Whether this then gave them more wriggle room when it came to negotiating with those demanding refunds I could not say, but I’d not be amazed if it did. Anecdotally I have also heard from more than one reliable source of hotels, having insisted on lengthy, vastly expensive block bookings, refusing to offer any refunds at all. Which is always going to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Now, and to be clear, I don’t know for sure how much if any of this is true, but something has happened to cause so many manufacturers to turn their back on surely the world’s most prestigious motor show. Will it recover? I’d not be putting money on it.

I was researching a story the other day and came across a quote that I thought I might share with you, because it describes precisely the place in automotive development which I feel we have reached. It goes as follows: “[They] will soon get to a point where an increase in horsepower will not give a sensible increase in speed owing to the weight of the parts. It will then be time to leave the horsepower and turn attention to the reduction in weight and the increase in efficiency.” The words were written five days into the start of the new century, but not the one in which we reside today, but the one before that. They formed part of a letter published in The Motor-Car Journal on January 5, 1900. Their author? A young 22-year-old lad already making his name in racing circles, called Charles Stewart Rolls.

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A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery
Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel