Summer has arrived early and the automotive calendar is bustling, with many of its big-ticket events being fancy concours displays. Y’know the sort: priceless Ferraris and vintage Bugattis lined up by the one percenters to lap up the wonder and reverence they hardly lacked in the first place. Which is perhaps why Lincolnshire’s Festival of the Unexceptional (FOTU) has rocketed up in our collective estimation so quickly. It puts the phenomenally ordinary on a pedestal and celebrates the sheer mundanity driven by the remaining 99 per cent of us every single day.
While you’re too late to enter a car into this year’s Concours de l’Ordinaire , we’ve sourced 18 cars which fit the criteria (a minimum of 25 years old, as little pretence as possible) and which will look sublime in the visitors’ car park, primed and ready to be spruced up for official recognition next year. And where else to start but with a car so everyday in its ethos, its name is synonymous with a whole demographic of British politics? Mondeos are no longer the ubiquitous street furniture they used to be, lending this low-mileage Mk1 a tantalising whiff of the exotic.
Or perhaps you were a Cavalier family? Much of the late 20th century saw Ford and Vauxhall slug it out in the sales charts, their halo repmobiles acting as central tenets to it all. While the battle felt unmistakably British, only the Cavalier could claim to be made on our shores (in Vauxhall’s now defunct Luton plant). The Mondeo was built in Belgium…
If you’re seeking the gloriously ordinary, this is it: second-rung L trim, white paint and rubber bumpers, all clothing an utterly bland 1.6-litre engine and manual ‘box. You likely had poor company car park bragging rights with a Cav like this in early Nineties Britain – but a notably better chance of a rosette and a pat on the back at FOTU now because of it.
If you wanted to break from the Ford and Vauxhall norm on your company car list, Rover presented the 600 as an alternative: neatly styled, subtly retro but with smart Japanese engineering under the skin (thanks to a tie-up with Honda), these were surprisingly good things if the contemporary accounts hold true. Hunt hard and you’ll source a 620ti with almost 200bhp of turbocharged power, channelled through a limited-slip diff. Ordinary glory is more likely to be bestowed upon this humbler, 113bhp 620i, however. “Really looked after by a previous doctor owner” may feel like a weird flex in a car advert, but such is life when you dredge this pond of the classifieds…
And now for something completely, utterly different. Daihatsu imported the Sirion into the UK from the late Nineties as a curiously retro coded rival to the Fiestas and Corsas which continually lit up the sales charts. Where plenty of those have been allowed to rust away into the ether – too humdrum to be considered heroes – this cloudy beige alternative lives on. A mere 55,000 miles for under £700 feels like a steal whatever car you’re buying – just be mindful it needs a decent tidy up if it’s to grace the concours lawn next summer. We can’t imagine parts are easy to come by, either.
Perhaps the real trick is buying something that looks as plain as a freshly opened ream of A4 paper but which sings vibrantly beneath the surface. A car possessing enough depth to entertain you long after you’ve walked the lawns of Grimsthorpe Castle, ice cream in hand. This Volvo S70 looks plain on the surface – handsome, yes, but evidently a saloon prior to the Swedes’ glow-up – yet a warbling five-cylinder 2.5-litre engine lurks beneath its square-jawed bonnet. There’s no turbo, so it won’t be rapid, but quiet satisfaction feels almost guaranteed.
A weekend of Formula 1 at Silverstone – with official parking and the occasional lukewarm burger – or a whole entire car to drive to FOTU and back again? That’s the question being hypothetically posed by this humble little Suzuki. Wearing British plates and cheap plastic hubcaps, it looks pretty dorky – but transpose some square, Japanese-script plates fore and aft and suddenly the Wagon R’s original kei car genesis sparks vividly back into life. A Euro-friendly 1.3-litre engine ensures it should traverse the Lincolnshire lanes to Grimsthorpe better than an actual kei car too.
Perhaps the real route to humdrum glory is something that’s as deeply uncompetitive now as it was in period. Enter this Daewoo Lanos saloon, a car of little design or dynamic appeal yet one which can’t help but spark our curiosity in such marvellous condition with a mere 21,000 miles to its name .
Don’t recall the work of Daewoo? It was the Jaecoo of its day, and not just for its rhyming vowel sounds. It offered a fresh name at knockdown prices to risk-taking Brits. This South Korean hatch and saloon didn’t sell at anything like the rate those Chinese SUVs currently are, however, making a Lanos all the more likely to snap necks on the concours lawn as people rack their brains to recognise its badges.
Some unexceptional cars nail the brief with such thorough precision that they perhaps emerge as exceptional after all. The second-gen, K11 Nissan Micra is one such car. Flick deep into the Top Gear magazine archive and you’ll witness these things swatting away all comers to win countless comparison tests, while its revvy little engines and mechanical reliability have earned it surprising kudos as an ordinary classic of extraordinary engineering depth. Seeking near-bulletproof transport at a knockdown price? You need look no further.
Another everyday car with an arguably exceptional edge: modern-day CR-Vs consistently rank high in the world’s bestselling car charts, and Honda has sold over 15 million of ‘em across its six generations. Yet the earliest cars still feel joyfully quirky ; crossovers when they were still full of charming design, the CR-V’s oddest boasts being its beach-ready table, chairs and shower. Enough to inspire a morally dubious telly ad with the stars of Men Behaving Badly …
Unexceptional transport incarnate. The Corolla has lived for over 60 years across 12 generations, its status as ‘commodity’ underscored by its status as the world’s bestselling car ever , Toyota having shifted over 50 million of the things as we type these words. Owners loyally buy one after another, perhaps making it even more of a surprise that someone clings so lovingly to an example so plain : with an automatic gearbox, wind-down windows and rhino hide interior aesthetic, an ancestor to the GR Corolla this emphatically isn’t. But that attitude is precisely what this list is all about.
Eschewing the bootlid badge wars of its rep car rivals, the Passat simply exuded poshness whichever version you went for. Engineering nous too; it belongs to the Ferdinand Piëch era of Volkswagen group thinking and while a 123bhp 1.8-litre 4cyl engine sounds a little plain on paper, its five-valves-per-cylinder layout hinted at more affluent thinking. This B5-gen Passat shared much with the inaugural Audi A4 and its smooth styling (hasn’t it aged handsomely?) offered a nice, slippery aero profile. Its mid-life facelift saw the introduction of a 4.0-litre W8 powertrain too, don’t forget…
A car surely intended to err towards the exceptional, the Cougar was Ford’s big follow up to the near perfect little Puma. Yet its basis in an American-market Mercury meant it failed to hit the same ride and handling highs. The styling was vivid, though, and the passing of time only makes a swooshy, V6-powered coupe with a mainstream badge feel increasingly improbable. Three grand secures you the chance to bore all who’ll listen about how misunderstood the poor Cougar really was in its short run of production.
How to rival the increasingly popular Suzuki Jimny? By employing a revered Italian design house to proficiently slice your big, rugged 4x4 down a size. That’s exactly what Mitsubishi did with its Shogun in the late Nineties, contracting it by half a metre and hiring Pininfarina (hence the suffix) to help the end product look authentic. Proper off-road mechanicals beneath ensured it drove authentically, too. Thrashy, polluting engines yield big tax bills now to perhaps spell the downfall of these existing in meaningful numbers on British roads. Which is all the more reason to cherish this one…
Need a 4x4 merely for its traction, not its raised ride? Subaru has specialised in four-wheel drive normcore for decades, this Legacy saloon a prime cut of its all-weather ability jib. It’s a pertinent time to buy, too, production having recently drawn to a close in the US after nearly four decades, Legacy sales cruelly cannibalised by its Outback spin-off. With its two owners, low mileage and irresistibly drab ‘silver on grey’ aesthetic, we’d place good money on this example bubbling away at the thick end of FOTU judging in the years to come.
Launched in 1994, the Compact chopped the front third of an E36 3 Series saloon and fixed it to a stunted, hatchback body. Still longitudinally engined and rear-wheel driven, it distilled core BMW thinking into a cheaper, shorter platform while looking gawkier and notably less tailormade than the 1 Series which eventually succeeded it. But there’s something joyously pragmatic about it all – particularly in low-powered, automatic form like we have here – that ought to ensure the propellor badge sits neatly among the Puntos and Primeras which typically occupy the FOTU lawns.
Proof of the perseverance required to win FOTU’s Concours de l’Ordinaire comes no greater than last year’s victor. The 1992 Skoda Favorit Forum is proletarian in the extreme, not even equipped with a radio, while its 22-year-old owner Simon Packowski endured a 1,000-mile road trip to ensure it occupied the lawns with period-correct headrests – ones notable for their abject lack of comfort.
Skip his dedication by spending a sizeable five grand on the Favorit’s successor (only a grand less than this Felicia 1.3 L cost new!) and though you’re unlikely to leave with a trophy, you’ll at least enjoy the luxury of a tape deck to post some late Nineties tunes into for the drive home.
Before the spunky little Saxo came the more angular AX. It’s prime ordinary fodder, not only for its rather sparse cabin, but its gleeful parade of trims and special editions. Tonic, Elation, Forte, Chic… they all speak of unending hope and optimism when fixed to a meagrely equipped tin can.
A joyous little tin can, at that; these things are almost infamously agile to drive and the idea of jetting down to Cannes only to totter languidly back in a clean-looking AX Prestige is one we’re having a tough time resisting.
Hyacinth Bucket your hero? Surely no car exudes her faux affluence quite like a Metro Cabriolet (and its Rover replacement). The stock Metro is entering its classic era, any surviving examples increasingly lavished with love and the aura of its madcap 6R4 rally entrant slowly enveloping the humdrum hatchbacks it helped sell.
The lesser-spotted Cabriolet is an odder fish altogether – who had bets on its flimsy fabric hood being electrically operated? This example also boasts the spritelier 1.4-litre engine for a whopping 75bhp to squeeze through its modestly strengthened chassis. Expect the crowds to part with biblical theatre if you drive this topless through the FOTU entrance gates…
