A 16 year old's take on the 2024 Bicester Heritage Sunday Scramble! The UK's best classic car show?

Is the Bicester Heritage Sunday Scramble the UK's best car show? We'll find out in this full walkaround of all the classic cars, supercars, sports cars and racing cars old and new in April's Scramble.
The second Sunday Scramble of 2024 at the historic WW2 airfield saw an incredible array of glorious cars, and in this video I will focus on the older, classic cars that attended, with some of my favourites including a trio of Gordon-Keebles, a Jaguar E-Type LW that was raced by Sir Stirling Moss, a Mclaren F1, a deafening Lotus Can-Am race car and many automotive delights from the 1900s to the modern day.
If you enjoyed this video, then make sure to comment below what you thought, and what YOUR favourite car at the April 2024 Bicester Sunday Scramble was, and don't forget to subscribe for future classic car related content, including an in-depth walkaround of the public car park of this Scramble, which served as a classic car show in itself!
Thanks for watching!

#classiccars #classiccarshow #sundayscramble

[daviddjerassi]

Thank you that was a great day out some smashing cars and for once sunshine from start to finish safe home Harley.

[jeffking]

2:46 am here in Jacksonville, Florida USA. Can’t sleep. Great time to watch . Cool.
📻🙂

[jeffking]

10:13 the top on the “Miata”, is a Bikini top [ or a Bimini top]. Very popular on Jeeps.
📻🙂
39:45: Monteverdi is a Swiss made car. [ 1967-1982] They made several different cars, and even an SUV.

[MichaelCondron-xn]

A great collection and great commentary good on you Harley well done cheers

[greerbox]

Another great video Harley. Some fantastic machinery. I think my take home would be that beautiful Alvis TD22. A true gentleman’s’ car ❤️

[jefftaplin]

Your knowledge of classic autos is very impressive!👍🏻

[bobspeller]

The Scramble meeting are getting better each time, I should hVe my Triumph Stag T the next one. Great video Harley, it’s really good to see a young man with great interest in historic cars. Well done, Bob

[JamesBond-xfjp]

I am also awake early here in Pennsylvania. I generally watch your videos later in the morning, oh well, why wait? You are correct about the LaSalle, it's marketed just under Cadillac. Basically it was between Buick and Cadillac and produced between 1927 and 1940. Thanks for another great video!!

[Vince_uk]

Some bobby dazzlers there Harley, Car to take home the BMW 635. Good video and you must have been exhausted.

[JamesHuttonVideo]

I'll take that lovely Bentley T series home please. 41:25. Great video Harley.

[davesouthall]

For info the am has a boat tail with fishtail exhaust. Wow.

[RobertGott-cf]

Great video Harley as to be one of your best
Well done😊😊😊😊😮excellent

[Rich-]

Despite me watching your dads reports on the same show I still watch your version as well, nice to either see other cars or different comments to the same cars. The "odd" roof on the MX5 is known as a Bikini top or half roof / hood , its a halfway house between having a standard soft top, so instead of having the whole roof extended, you fit that to keep the worst of the wind or rain from you whilst also providing that "open top" feeling. I wonder at aged 16 whether your dad was as knowledgeable, perhaps you could ask him, although you may wish to duck as something gets thrown at you, lol... Great video as per.

[KiwiStag]

What a great collection of classics, mate. Ok, some of the newer ones are cool too, but classics are more of an eye-catcher and soul-tapper due to the nostalgia factor and their (now) rarity.

A couple of things I'd like to give you a bit of personal history of.

The Swallow Doretti - you reckoned the dash dials reminded you a bit of early TR. Well, you were spot on the money there, bud - the Doretti ran a TR2 driveline and other parts liberated from the spares bin at Standard Triumph, although the chassis was an in-house design and build. These wee beasties could get to 100mph with the help of an overdrive unit. They were only in manufacture for a couple of years (1954 and 55 from memory) and less than 300 were sold....and I'm pretty sure it was less than 280 in actual fact. There are two I know of here in New Zealand - one of which I spent a lot of time drooling over (and following) during a local rally through the back roads of the area near where I live with the local TR Register. It's a beautiful car to see going along the road and its sound is so magical out pipes at 50mph!

You waxed lyrical about the A35 van and the A35 saloon having modified 1275cc A-series engines and how quick they'd be. I can tell you for a fact that even with an 1150cc (which is a 60 thou over 1098cc engine) in situ!

A mate of mine back in the mid-to-late 80s owned an Austin A35 van. How this thing passed it's MoT equivalent here I have no idea, but it regularly did. Mind you, this was before the rust laws, so the fact it had half its sills, an 8" gap between the back end and centre rear arches where the metal had rusted off, the front wings were self-tapping screwed to the inner wing because the lower brackets were no longer in existence, the bottoms of the doors had gone - and this is all before we get to the fact that this car had been run into the back of a Hino bus before he bought it, straightened out with a club hammer and had a lovely coat of housepaint slapped on it with a wide brush and which was somewhere near the same colour as the rest of the van. Underneath was solid as a rock though, as were the floor pans.

Anyway, my mate was a mechanic and he found an 1100cc engine from a 1970s Morris Minor van, sat down with the thing and had it bored to 60 thou oversized, balanced pistons and crank, blueprinted the engine, ground out the valve seats for bigger valves then ported and polished the head, making sure to ensure that when the intake and exhaust manifolds were in place, that the size of the respective ports were a match. That way there was no minor blockage or turbulence caused by small intrusions of metal from a smaller sized port. Him and I spent hours in his bedroom, listening to Pink Floyd, with me prepping / finishing off the engine parts and him assembling it on the floor in front of the speakers.

He then threw a BCF731 (road-race) cam and used double valve springs (as the old 948 that was originally in the car used to valve-bounce something chronic at 5000rpm....which by all rights it should never have been pulling anyway, but he'd hold it there for long periods with the speedometer sitting pegged at the end of the 80mph speedo). He then topped this all off with a set of modified LCB Mini headers and a 1.75" exhaust with single twin 1.25" SU carbs.

The engine had the beautiful lope one expects from the -731 grind out the back, while up front all you could hear was the faint tick of a slightly loose tappet with the engine sitting there still as a statue. The little beasty could rev to 7500rpm too! I reckoned he was an utter nutter for chucking this worked piece of automotive art into a rotten old van without even beefing the brakes up, but he just grinned and said that it was the shock factor of an old bomb blasting past people with better cars, that he was wanting to achieve. He sure did that. He also reckoned that cops would not believe their speed detectors and wouldn't bother chasing him....and he never got a speeding ticket either, the sod! I got several in the Alfa Sprint Veloce I drove at the time, but his A35 van could sail past a checkpoint doing 20 over the limit and they'd barely bat an eyelid!

I did once straight-line drag race him - my Alfa vs the A35 van - over a measured 0.3 of a mile. The A35 had me off the start and for a fair way of the distance, but the Alfa caught him and got its bumper in front just as we got over the finish line. Damn that thing was quick! However, one thing it was NOT quick on was stopping and while the Alfa pulled up, turned around and went back to the mates of ours who were recording the event, then parked and I got out and walked over to where they were standing and was just in time to see the A35 van way in the distance a good three quarters of a mile down the road, turning around to come back....still doing about 20mph when it came about! He saw sense then and improved the braking system. He said the brakes were good to get him back to 50mph and then they just went away - too hot to keep working - and he had to crash it back through the gears and try to pull it up before the road ran out.

So, would a worked-over 1275 bored to 1310 or 1330 be quicker? You betcha!

All the best - and thanks for a brilliant tour of an excellent show

[Carl-xyc]

Hi 👋 Harley. The red Bristol I liked . We never sold them here in New Zealand. I have never seen one either. That's not to say that's there's not one here somewhere . A question Harley, were they all hand built ?. The Porsche is cool I like cars with yellow headlights, the French cars have them . I love the Alfa Romeo Montreal, very nice indeed. Terrific car show. Thanks Harley.

[davesouthall]

Frontline. Mgb specialist that car probably cost 100 thou.