From Veteran to Vintage...

With the recent move of the Vintage Sports-Car Club to fine new offices, library and workshops in Chipping Norton, new staff, and new financial arrangements including sponsorship by Motor Sport, the origins of this top club are of interest. According to the Press pack, the idea evolved from The Light Car’s suggestion 60 years ago, i e in 1938.

In fact, the VSCC was formed on October 30, 1934, named at first the Veteran Sports Car Club, soon changed to Vintage SCC in deference to the Veteran CC, which had been founded in 1930. As far back as the 1920s a letter in The Autocar had advocated a trial for really early low-powered cars and those Light Car letters had been proposing a club for pre-1932 A7s and the like, rather as I founded the 750 MC in 1939. But even prior to these letters another had appeared in The Autocar dated March 25, 1932, appealing for a club of genuine ex-racing cars more than five years old, sportscars that had gone out of production, and the earlier types of home-built specials (modesty forbids me to name the writer).

All these promptings jelled to create the VSCC, originally for pre-1931 sports cars such as 30/98s and Bentleys, etc. It is now an organisation respected worldwide, and seems destined to advance even further. It has expanded enormously since those simple, jolly formative years of long ago; its motto is now “Quintessentially British great fun.” The next big fixture is the Sir Henry Segrave Memorial Race Meeting at Oulton Park on June 27.