Happy New Year! We hope you had a great time over Christmas and New Year's Eve, and are feeling refreshed and ready for 2024!
A few of us met up at Brooklands Motor Museum for the annual New Year's Day Classic Gathering yesterday (Monday 1 January 2024) to get the year started in true JK Team style: chatting at a car show!
If you haven't been before, it's definitely worth hauling yourself out of bed to head over to the Brooklands Museum in your pre-31 July 1994 vehicle for the show. It's a great opportunity to catch up with people, check out a massive range of classic cars, have a look around Brooklands Museum, and get the year off to a strong start.
I headed to the show in Jack, our 1956 Oval Beetle, who started up fine and drove beautifully after spending the last few months in storage for the winter. It was a smooth drive, with only a little bit of niggling anxiety about how much fuel we had, as I'd forgotten to check before we set out and the gauge is less than reliable! Still, we got there (and back) with no dramas at all, and parked up alongside some other really cool classics, including another Beetle.
The New Year's Day Classic Gathering has display parking for any vehicle registered before 31 July 1994, which obviously means there's a massive variety of different makes and models on display. It was great to see so many VWs on display, from early Beetles and T2 Splitscreens, through to a VW Karmann Ghia and a Type 3 Squareback.
As well as taking a look at all the different classics on display, and chatting to the owners, the New Year's Day Gathering also lets you look around the whole of the Brooklands Museum, which includes the historic race track, aviation factory, aircraft park, motoring village, and the bus museum. I went along with my four-year-old son who dragged me into the bus museum as soon as he could - he still thinks it's great, even though we've been through there half a dozen times on previous visits to Brooklands!
Lewis from the JK Team was there with his family, having driven over in his 1970 VW Beetle which is now back on the road. If you've been following his restoration project on our YouTube channel, you'll know that the Beetle is Lewis' first classic car, and that he and our on-site mechanic, 'Workshop Mark', have been doing some work to it (which turned into quite a bit of work!). It was great to see that Lewis was able to get to Brooklands and back with no major issues, so hopefully he'll be able to attend loads more shows in 2024.
Our talented photographer, Nick, was also at the show, and got some really great photos for us. We've no doubt this'll only be the first of dozens of car events that Nick heads to in 2024, as his passion for cars, photography, and motorsport will be taking up a lot of his weekends again this year!
If you're looking for some upcoming VW shows and events to head to this year, then check out our 2024 VW Shows Calendar, which we've updated for the new year. There's a huge amount going on across the UK and in the EU if you fancy a bit of a road trip!
