Britain has a new car show, guaranteed to be more colourful and diverse than any so far listed in the UK’s busy calendar.
The first-ever Petrol & Pride meeting, aimed at combining the car passions of members of the LBGTQ+ community with those of their allies in the British automotive industry and anywhere else, was held on Friday at the British Motor Museum in Gaydon, the mammoth motoring complex that’s also home to JLR and Aston Martin.
The idea sprang up earlier this year when an annual list of LGBTQ+ ‘trailblazers’ was published by Attitude magazine. Publisher Darren Styles and editor Cliff Joannou noted a rising number of car companies in their list and wondered whether their input could make a car show.
Bentley comms director Wayne Bruce grabbed that idea and came up with a plan to stage the event at the BMM, an easily found venue with plenty of parking and its own obvious attractions. He obtained the necessary permissions, co-opted Bentley’s events team Goose (organisers the Silverstone Classic) into his gang and scheduled Petrol & Pride to be held for the first time on a sunny Friday afternoon in July.
Attitude and others publicised the event and word also spread widely via social media. Even so, no one really knew how this thing would play out. True, around 180 cars had been pre-registered, but how many would actually show?
The answer was that they all did. The sheer success of the thing took the organisers by surprise. Cars of all kinds, prices, ages and pedigrees – and especially of all colours – started streaming through the Gaydon gates shortly before mid-day, the appointed opening time.
By early afternoon, the allotted 200-car parking space was filled, with more needed on surrounding grass. The front row was reserved for a rainbow array of colourful 21 cars (three each of the spectrum’s constituent colours), with the last space reserved for a bronze-orange Bentley Continental GT (the official colour is Orange Flame) driven in by Bentley’s CEO, Frank-Steffen Walliser – one of various car company bigwigs lending support.
Bentley also brought along an extravagantly decorated Flying Spur to mark the inauguration of this new event, while Lister boss Lawrence Whittaker (who also runs Warrantywise) arrived in a magnificently wrapped Jaguar LFT-666 coupé for the occasion.
Colourful decor and bold signwriting was everywhere, matching the cars and the apparel of attendees, and the warmth of the sun matched that of the happy crowd – who were all invited to visit the museum’s 400-car collection as part of their attendance.
A count-up of attending car-company models showed that the event had won support from Alpine, Aston Martin, Bentley, Dacia, Genesis, Jaguar, Land Rover, McLaren, Peugeot, Renault, Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen and more – all of them keen to stress the importance of diversity and inclusiveness both to the success of their businesses and the satisfaction of their employees and customers.
There were several prize winners: the butchest car was a 991 Porsche 911 GT3 (with a satanic-looking matt-grey Pontiac Catalina as runner-up) and the gayest car was a Mk3.5 Volkswagen Golf Cabrio in an almost overwhelmingly bright shade of Futura Yellow (with a tiny Lotus Europa as runner up).
But the programme-ending best story award was grabbed by a pair of blokes who had just finished rescuing and reviving an old Vauxhall Frontera from a local garden – on grounds that it didn’t deserve to die – and had given it a vivid set of orange wheels to celebrate its new lease on life.
They had only just managed to squeeze it through the MOT test in time for the event and took the big prize to warm applause. Like so many tales on that sunny afternoon, it was an inspiring story of car love and optimism.
