Tickets for the 2025 Festival of the Unexceptional are now on sale. Hosted by Hagerty, the event is a celebration of motoring ‘ordinary-ness’ which somehow manages to be exceptional in its unexceptionality. Exhibits are volume production cars from 1968 to 1998 which may have been prevalent in our younger lives, but which have generally not survived to today, as values were eventually so low that they ended up being scrapped.
The emotional hooks, simple pleasures and deep-seated psychology behind ‘unexceptional’ cars
Being in the presence of ordinary cars so closely linked to memory can have much more powerful emotional and psychological effects than the glitzy glamour of unattainable high-end classics.
For many of us growing up, cars were a symbol of competence, freedom, and status. Engaging with those same cars now can feel like reclaiming or reinterpreting a cultural script of manhood: one grounded in mechanics, independence, and a specific aesthetic of strength and utility.
Everything about a classic car – the smell of the leather, the mechanical feedback of the steering, the sound of the engine – is a visceral time machine. It evokes a period not just of your life, but of a broader cultural moment that shaped your family’s story.
Like a well-preserved toy, a classic car stands against the tide of time. More than that, it embodies craftsmanship, longevity, and a defiant elegance. It says: something from the past still matters. Still runs. Still shines.
Many of us have gone through a cycle of buying our dad’s old cars. There is something slightly primal or archetypal about owning and driving the car you once experienced solely from the back seat, or admired as a child. It closes a circle. The boy who watched becomes the man who owns or maintains. It’s not just nostalgia, it’s integration.
If your relationship with your father or grandfather was complicated, a classic car can become a safe proxy, something you can admire, maintain, and relate to without the emotional entanglement. It offers a path to honour the good without re-entering the bad.
Driving or restoring a car your father or grandfather once drove isn’t just nostalgic, it’s a form of connection across time. It’s a way of stepping into their world, seeing life through their eyes, and keeping part of them alive. The car becomes a vessel of memory and masculine lineage.
These objects serve as portals to a time when life felt simpler, safer, or more magical. They’re not just cars, they’re emotional anchors to moments of joy, wonder, and innocence. The preservation adds to the allure: it feels like time itself has been gently held still.
Where and when it’s on
Festival of the Unceptional takes place at Grimsthorpe Castle (PE10 0LY) in Lincolnshire from 7:30am to 5pm on 26th July. I will be there in my quaint Nissan Figaro: a contradiction of ordinariness, with its three-speed automatic gearbox and Micra mechanical underpinnings, wrapped in an art deco body. No throwback to childhood in this one – I just love the car. It’s like a cross betwen a Miffy doll and a shipwrecked Japanese artefact that washed up on the other side of the world.
Here’s hoping for good weather on the day – the event is just superb when bathed in sunshine.
Pics from the Hagerty website ©Hagerty/Matt Howell et al