UK enthusiasts have been left reeling after a series of high-profile events announced their cancellation for 2024. The reasons vary but legislation and insurance woes loom large, presenting an ominous outlook for other diary dates.
Among the biggest to bite the dust is MG Live! at Silverstone, all the more shocking as it comes only a year after the record-breaking and award-winning MG (and Triumph) centenary gathering in 2023. A statement from its organiser said: ‘The MG Car Club Council reluctantly took the decision to cease arranging race meetings because of the increasingly serious fi nancial risks involved.’ The annual festival was not deemed viable without the track action.
Of other casualities, the enormous Dorset Steam Fair squarely blamed the inability to get suitable insurance for the event, while the Bromley Pageant of Motoring – the biggest one-day classic car show in the world – cited London’s expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone as the primary culprit for its demise.
As reported last month, HERO-ERA’s gruelling Le Jog winter rally will take a break in 2024, but the most historic event to be axed is the Brighton Speed Trials (pictured), first held in 1905 before Brighton’s historic Madeira Drive even had that name. Brighton & Hove Motor Club blamed ‘new road layouts, the closing of terraces, and the cost involved in safety and security measures’. It added that it ‘had to make the heartbreaking decision that the 2023 event was the last one. The Club has been running the event at a loss for a number of years and cannot continue to do so.’ Key factors included the loss of the Madeira Terrace as a viewing platform in 2016 and the end of the motorbike trials in 2021.
A younger yet also popular event that involves Brighton has fallen by the wayside, too. The London to Brighton Mini Run had taken place since 1986, but has succumbed to a wealth of ‘challenging’ factors including costs, ULEZ, parking at the destination and increased bureaucracy.
