Estoril Classics 2024 – A “better late than never” review and Editorial note

We know what you may be thinking and yes, it indeed took a minute for the Estoril Classics 2024 coverage to finally pop up at Automotive Views. The delay was tied to a number of factors, a lot of them just plain down to time constraints over the last few months, but to be perfectly frank, there was something else bogging down the process, namely how car shows here in Portugal, were we’re based, have made us feel lately. And although the Estoril Classics isn’t the worst offender, the fact that it is the last one we covered sort of lends itself to be slapped with a little extra editorial note.

As with other events of this nature, we’ve been covering the Estoril Classics for years now. Actually we’re the only place where a fairly complete visual coverage of the thing is regularly featured. Despite this, our ticket has always been a general public one, and that allows us to really see the thing in a way we wouldn’t with any kind of special access. As such, like we’ve said a number of times now, the experience is lacking. By quite a bit.

At its core, the Estoril Classics is a great and pretty unique opportunity to see, hear, touch, smell, and just generally enjoy rare, stunning cars. On that aspect it delivers beautifully and we’re truly thankful it exists, so we’ll absolutely continue to visit. Even with rising admittance prices, the values are still way below what you’d expect to pay at similar or just marginally larger events throughout Europe, so we can’t even fault it that much for it. But being accessible by the public and being for the public are two very, very different things. It helps to think of the Estoril Classics and almost all other events of a similar nature around here as not something made for the public, which also happens to have guests, but as something made for the guests, which just happens to be accessible to the public. And once you pick up on that difference, the flaws become glaring.

Again, the Estoril Classics isn’t the only offender, as the past year’s events of this kind felt increasingly distant towards the general public (some, with downright hostile instances as we’ve experienced ourselves at another show), but it is the worst one on this particular point. We’re not gonna go through every positive and negative point as we’ve done that a number of times in the past, but instead we’ll just wish that at some point in the future this trend will shift towards a better experience which, at this time, is entirely up to the good will, patience and mood of the teams and their members at any given time. On this point, we just have to say bless the mechanics which overwhelmingly, even having to deal all day with members of the public which really push it in some aspects, when politely asked for information or access to take better pictures, will still happily oblige. However and with that being said, your enjoyment of the event you paid to get into shouldn’t solely be up to someone’s good or bad momentary disposition, but should also be a concern (some would say, one of the main ones) of the event’s organizers/promoters. And yet, you feel like it hasn’t even crossed someone’s mind, let alone become a concern.

With that (broad!) editorial asterisk out of the way, we’ll leave you to peruse through some pictures of really wonderful stuff, including the race cars themselves and even a couple of noteworthy visitor’s rides.