Gareth Jones

First things first, for nearly 600 photographs of the event, click here.

Last weekend I went to Classic Car Live 2010 with my father, to Mondello Park near Naas (nay-ass) in Ireland. We went in his 1966 Ford Mustang and got the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin on Saturday morning. The crossing was incredibly smooth and you only knew that you were on a boat when you looked out the window.

We got to Ireland to find that it was sunny and pretty hot – a welcome change from the last time we went to this event back in 2008 when it was chucking it down and blowing a gale. Sat-nav on my Desire got us onto the N7 carriageway without having to go through the centre of Dublin and we got to Naas in good time.

When we got to Naas we checked into the hotel that we’d booked to find that the room was unavailable because some woman who had slept in there the night before still hadn’t checked out – and this was at 3pm. They offered to put us up at a house that was also owned by the hotel owner, and since there was some OAP party on at the hotel we accepted. We left them to sort the house out and get it ready for us and headed into town for some beers.

It is at this point that I have to make a couple of complaints about Ireland. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s incredibly expensive over there and despite the Pound having made up some ground against the Euro since last time we were over there, everything still costs at least 1.5x as much as it does in the UK and sometimes more than that. The second is the selection of beers on offer – there’s no Carling, no Fosters, no XXXX and no Stella. There’s Heineken, Budweiser and Carlsberg. I don’t like Carlsberg as it leaves a bitter after-taste and drinking Budweiser is pretty much the same as drinking still water, so that leaves Heineken and not much else. The Heineken in one place was nice; everywhere else is was awful. Luckily I spotted Kopparberg while trying to find an alternative drink, though sadly only the sickly mixed fruit version and not the pear version that I could drink all day. My father took a couple of those but then had to move onto something else; I stayed on them for the rest of the night.

The next morning let itself into my room earlier than anticipated thanks to some super-thin curtains. At 5am the room was lit up like it was midday, so it wasn’t long before we were both showered and ready for breakfast before making our way to the track. The paper-work we had from the organisers stated Gate 1 as our entrance; Gate 1 was closed and locked when we arrived. We continued down the road past gates 2 and 3 before finally arriving at gate 4 which was open letting people in. Since we were so early (not long after 8am!) there wasn’t much there yet, but this gave us ample opportunity to put our names down for some parade laps later in the day and for me to wonder around the paddock taking photos of the cars that would be screaming down the track in a few hours.

Over the course of the entire day more and more cars flooded into the grounds – from a rusty old BMW 2002tii to a quarter-million pound Aston Martin DB5 and everything in-between. An unfortunate down-side to the event being so popular was that the track was rammed with cars for the parade lap, and as a result the traffic was much slower than it was two years ago. The event organisers seem to have come up with a money-making solution to this problem though – for 50 Euros you can get onto a less populated track and race – which I think is what we’ll be doing next year. It’s not necessary to actually race the car, but to just be able to go quickly without being flagged down and without getting stuck behind some 1920s chariot-with-an-engine.

I really enjoyed Mondello Park this year, even though I was pretty badly burned in the Irish sun and even though there wasn’t a familiar pint to be had. The weather was great, the event was a huge success and it was a great opportunity to sink some beers with the old man since the Isle of Man trip a couple of months ago. This event was also the first event that I’ve gone to with my new SLR – a Sony Alpha 500. While I think there are still a fair few things for me to learn about using an SLR, I did manage to make some cool-looking wallpapers from a couple of the photos that I took which are also available to see in the Flickr section.

Next stop: Le Mans!