Terminally Uncool Proton Sedan Wins UK’s “Dadwood” Festival

Imagine a car show where you can challenge for top honours with a vehicle costing just $800 (£500). And I’m not talking about some kind of 24 Hours of LeMons shindig for butchered clunkers, but a show that places as much emphasis on condition and originality as anything you’ll see at Pebble Beach.

It’s called the Festival of the Unexceptional, and you can think if it as an anti-Goodwood of Speed. Instead of celebrating the fastest and sexiest cars of yesterday, the FoU showcases the slow and boring, the cars that were produced in the hundreds of thousands and once littered every street in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, but are ironically now harder to spot than vintage Ferraris.

Though it’s tempting to think of the FoU as the UK’s Radwood, it’s actually far less cool. You won’t find a Porsche, Lamborghini or iconic hot hatch on the top lawn where the concours de l’ordinaire judging takes place.

But you will find plenty of beautifully preserved poverty-spec sedans and hatches built within the 1966-1996 timeframe set by the show’s organisers. Instead of fancy alloy wheels and V6s, these cars wear original equipment plastic hubcaps and are powered by puny four-cylinder engines that often aren’t muscle enough to crack 100mph. Not so much Radwood then, as Dadwood.

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Though I didn’t make it to this year’s event, I did attend 2019’s and it’s a lot more fun than the low-octane subject matter probably makes it sound. Apart from getting the chance to see a bunch of cars I genuinely hadn’t seen for 20 or 30 years, I was seriously impressed by the depth of knowledge the car’s owners and showgoers possessed about the cars on display, which matched anything you’d get at a Porsche meet.

But the biggest takeaway was just how inclusive it felt. Hagerty, the British arm of the U.S. insurance giant that has run the show since 2014, has a strict no-sneering policy, and unlike the rare-groove exotic cars you’ll see at events like Goodwood, almost everyone at the show can relate to the cars at the FoU. If your dad or your neighbour didn’t own a beige Mazda 929 or Fiat Strada, you probably did know someone who did have one.

First place at this year’s show went to Jon Coupland’s 1989 Proton 1.5 GL Black Knight, which was a Malaysian version of Mitsubishi’s by-then obsolete Lancer (sold as the Dodge/Plymouth Colt in the U.S.), imported to the UK to sell to thrifty seniors who couldn’t tell a good car from a bad one, but liked the idea of electric windows and a decent warranty.

Like many of the cars at the show, the Proton’s incredible condition is down to its sparing use. It was stashed in a garage at four years old with just 3600 miles on the clock, and didn’t see daylight again until 2017.

Second place was awarded to Danny Wilson and his 1991 Peugeot 106 XN, which is an extremely early version with a manual choke. That’s the kind of geeky detail that would make a classic BMW or Porsche even more unaffordable, but not in the world of the Unexceptional. Wilson bought his 106 through Facebook Marketplace for just £500.

What car would you take to the Festival of the Unexceptional?