Festival of the Unexceptional 2025: the car show where a Morris Marina is more interesting than a McLaren

Deep in the Lincolnshire countryside, the roads look like a scene from 20 years ago – as past the parked rows of modern SUVs and electric cars streams a line of dumpy little cars from long ago. These are the visitors heading to the 2025 Festival of the Unexceptional, which is a car show that doesn’t honour the latest and greatest, but the ordinary and the mundane.

FotU was dreamed up as an event where people could celebrate cars they can relate to – in a way that you simply can’t at most car shows or concours events. Criteria for entry is simple: your car must be pre-2005, and it must be unexceptional. Granted, that’s not the easiest term to define – mostly, it refers to cars that were ubiquitous when new, but that time or apathy has conspired to make very rare indeed.

Held annually since 2014, and since 2021 in the grounds of Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, FotU is one of the highlights of my motoring calendar. Having attended in previous years in my own cars – early 90s Peugeots, both – this time I decided to do something a little different, and I managed to persuade Toyota to let me bring its heritage Mk1 Prius. As the earliest full hybrid car sold in the UK, and definitely a certified rare-yet-unexceptional car, I couldn’t think of anything better.

First stop was the Concours display at the front of the show. Lovingly titled the ‘Concours de l’Ordinaire’ – a play on the Concours d’Elegance you get at high-end car shows – this is a display of pre-selected models that the Festival’s organisers felt best exemplified the spirit of things. It’s an incredibly diverse lineup, but the uniting factor is that the cars are all examples that ‘normal’ people probably wouldn’t choose to save.

Take the K11 Nissan Micra I saw at the front of this display. These vehicles are survivors – like cockroaches, they’ll keep running through just about anything, and so there are any number of ratty examples around. But vanishingly rare are models like this – family-owned, one of the most basic entry-level models available, and in utterly immaculate condition.

Further in I found a Citroen Berlingo van, another vehicle that’s usually used and abused – but this one had been so carefully looked after that I had to do a double-take on reading that it had 240,000 miles on the clock.

The judging panel, made up of a crew of classic car journalists, presenters and experts, would later go through these Concours cars and hand out some awards. But my sights were now set on the rest of the car park – which is always where the best stuff sits.

The diversity of the show can be summed up just by looking at the row of cars I was parked in. ‘My’ Prius sat between a Mk3 Volkswagen Golf ‘Driver’ and a Subaru Impreza. Either side of those were a very tidy Renault Megane Scenic and a Fiat Panda. When’s the last time you saw a lineup like that?

The cars that get the most mobbed are the ones people remember from their own pasts. On sitting down for a picnic lunch by my friend Neil’s Citroen Xantia, we found ourselves constantly greeting people who wanted to talk about it. They remembered their mum driving one, or a neighbour. Some of them just wanted to sit inside so they could relive their youth with the smell of hot French plastic.

The Prius got plenty of interest, too – the Mk1 model was never really on people’s radars, with the Mk2 being far more popular, so plenty of people were almost unaware that it ever existed. Its dumpy dimensions and velour-trimmed seats which made it so ugly in period are just the features that make it perfect for this show.

As a French car enthusiast, my personal favourites were dripping in Gallic charm. It’s always a delight to see something like a Citroen LNA, of which just four remain registered in the UK, or perhaps a posh Roland Garros edition 106.

Compared with the grey-painted, black leather-trimmed, hybrid-powered SUVs I spend most of my days around, the best part of the FotU car park is the variety. These cars date from the era when colour wasn’t just allowed, it was desirable; when seats could be upholstered in leather or cloth or vinyl or tweed or tartan; when ‘base model’ didn’t just mean you got smaller alloy wheels, it meant you were lucky if you got a passenger side door mirror. And no manufacturer thought to call their special editions ‘something-line’ – you got things like Inca or Scandal.

It’s also an incredibly friendly car show. There’s little-to-no posturing, and the only cars deemed unacceptable are those that don’t get in the spirit of things. So a heavily modified Toyota Starlet dripping in Japanese text stickers didn’t have anybody batting an eyelid – but I remember vividly the boos a McLaren owner got at last year’s show when they decided to park in amongst the Unexceptional cars and not in the designated ‘modern’ car park.

All day you’ll be striking up conversations with people as they pass by your car, or you pass by theirs. Some attendees go there with a bag full of period car merch, ready to hand it out to anybody they particularly like – another brought a bag of rocks painted with car designs and left them by suitable entrants. It’s an event full of the best kind of delightful weirdos – probably why I feel quite so at home there.

The Festival’s top gong was eventually handed out to a 1991 Skoda Favorit Forum. It exemplifies this event – it was cheap and boring back in the day, but is now vanishingly rare. Its owner rescued it after a failed head gasket was about to consign it to the scrapheap, and has restored it to practically better-than-showroom condition. Second and third place were awarded to a Mk2 Ford Mondeo and a Citroen Visa respectively.

All in all, the 2025 Festival of the Unexceptional was a hugely enjoyable day out celebrating the utterly unremarkable.

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