John Simister: Perusing automotive beauty at Concours of Elegance

Now, nearly every Concours event claims to be showing the world's rarest/most desirable/most valuable/most 'iconic'/most etc cars, but not every such event actually manages to do so, sometimes plumping them out with oversized and rather daft modern supercars in the hope that a car-illiterate public will be impressed.

Not so this Concours of Elegance (a few genuinely special supercars excepted), the opening Friday of which turned out to be the most enjoyable, most heart-warming and most enthusiasm-firing car show I've been to since the Practical Classics Restoration Show at the beginning of the year. Especially pleasing is that there's no formal judging and no class structure, simply one overall winner resulting from every entrant's individual vote for their favourite car (excluding their own). 

The Concours' subject matter is poles apart from PC's, of course, but the owners are just as besotted with their cars. You would expect Ferraris, Bugattis, Bentleys and the like to dominate the Concours entry list, but with Ferrari's exception – it is the company's 70th anniversary years, after all – they didn't, especially. There was a strong Italian theme, though, with some gorgeous pre-war Alfa Romeos and some obscuranti I'll tell you about in a minute.

My plan at this event was not to be awed by the obvious. Instead, I wanted to home in on the unexpected. The perimeter road around the lawns provided plenty of that, for here gathered the cars that were not in the formal Concours but were nevertheless invited anyway. 

It was here that I met a bright yellow Jensen-Healey whose engine bay was being polished, an early wood-framed Marcos with the wooden ribs exposed inside its gullwing doors, a 1955 Jaguar MkVIIIM (the slightly hotter one with manual transmission) which had covered just 8000 miles from new when current owner John Smith bought it a year ago. It still has its original paint, now mirror-smooth from years of polishing, but John always drives it to shows. 'It ran beautifully on the motorway down from Yorkshire,' he reported, 'and it keeps up with all the traffic.'

Then, passing a modern Zagato-bodied Bentley with a double-bubble roof and a delicious Lancia Dilambda with its narrow-angle V8 engine, I came upon a car at once familiar and subtly different. It was almost an early Aston Martin Vanquish, but not quite. It was Project Vantage, the concept car that became the Vanquish but only after every panel had been changed as required to render it suitable and legal for production. 

It was never really meant to be driven in anger, but then-boss of Ford (and therefore, at that time, ultimately of Aston Martin) Jac Nasser ragged it around the Millbrook test track before giving it the go-ahead and its fragile suspension bent so much the wheels disappeared into the arches. There ensued an all-night rebuild because the Project was due to be dispatched to the Detroit show the next day, where it was received rapturously. 

Today it's road legal, with proper, specially-made glass where it once has Perspex, but its race-style pushrod suspension is still present. The whole modern-Aston look began properly with this car, and here is found the beginnings of the extruded and bonded aluminium construction and the design of the bold centre console. It's a vital part of Aston Martin's history, but it belongs to an enthusiastic private owner who bought it at auction and made it work properly. Project Vantage was designed by Ian Callum, nowadays Jaguar's design director. He was at the Concours too. Are you judging, I asked. 'No, I've retired from Concours judging. People are too worried about the right rivets. I'm more worried about how a wheel looks in its wheelarch.' 

Not far behind Project Vantage was a car which does belong to an official Aston organisation, the Aston Martin Heritage Trust. Trustee Rob Smith was the day's custodian for A3, the oldest surviving Aston Martin and a car I've been itching to drive for ages. That ambition is drawing near but is temporarily thwarted by the gearbox's current habit of selecting two gears instead of one.

And the Concours entrants continued to arrive, multifarious exhaust notes marking their passage: the Lindner-Nöcker Lightweight E-type, a Lancia Astura Aerodynamica coupé by Castagna bodied in 1935, a 1953 Ferrari 340 MM Vignale Spider in American racing colours – and one of my favourite cars in the whole event, a one-off Fiat 1100 Spider bodied in 1946 by the just-established carrozzeria of Frua. It looks amazingly modern for its time, with low headlights faired into the front wings, a horizontal five-bar grille in between and a fetching dorsal fin.