We started participating in Classic Car Runs in 1993 when we took our E-Type on the Norwich Union RAC Classic Run which finished at Silverstone. At that time the Norwich Union was a single day run held on the Whitsun weekend. Due to its popularity the organisers started to offer 2 and 3 day runs and we graduated to these including our first two foreign starts: one that started in Dublin and returned via North Wales; one from the Palace of Versailles in Paris via a ferry from Caen to Portsmouth through the New Forest in Hampshire and then up through Southern England to Silverstone.
After seeing the level of demand for classic cars, we started The Open Road in 1997 to enable people who didn’t own such cars to enjoy the thrills of driving them by hiring them whenever they wish. The business has grown steadily year on year and we now have the nine cars listed on this web site on our fleet. We took a deliberate decision to concentrate on classic British cars, hence the current choice of Austin Healey, Jaguar, MG and Triumph cars for hire.
In 2006 we received enough requests for a classic Ford Mustang that we decided to change our 'British only' policy and added a beautiful 1996 Ford Mustang Fastback to the fleet. This has now proved as popular as our Jaguar E-Type.
In the past we have had an Austin Healey ‘Frogeye’ Sprite and even a Lotus Elan Plus2 for hire. Each year we look back at which cars receive the least demand and sell these, replacing them with others that our customers are requesting. the Frogeye, Elan and a Triumph Spitfire fell victim to this process. We give our customers a questionnaire to complete, which includes the opportunity for them to list the cars they would like us to add to our fleet. This web site also has a ‘shopping list’ enabling customers to enter these details online.
We take our own driving seriously, having completed a Drive & Survive course, and in 1998 we both completed the Advanced Driver Safety course, run by Peter Gethin Driving Courses Ltd. As the Norwich Union and other classic runs invariably include the opportunity to take the cars on the track, we also both took track lessons at Silverstone.
We continue to participate in a number of classic car runs every year, although the Norwich Union stopped in 1997, only to be re-instated 10 years later as the Norwich Union MSA Classic on Sunday 14 October 2007. We have enjoyed many local club runs from both the Jaguar Drivers’ Club and the local area of the Arden MG Club as well as completing nine trips across Europe on the MSA Euro Classic. We have driven our MGB Roadster to the South of France, our Triumph TR4A to Salzburg, Austria, our Jaguar E-Type to Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria and our Triumph TR6 to Valencia in Spain and Florence and Imola in Italy and then in May of 2005 around Denmark and Sweden. In 2006 we completed the Euroclassic which ran from Lille in northern France to Baden-Baden in southern Germany. See www.euro-classic.co.uk for details and photographs of the past MSA Euroclassics and the trip to Spain and Portugal planned for October 2007.
Tony writes a monthly column called 'Letter from England' for an American classic car club magazine British Marque. This goes out to over 50 US based car clubs that cover British classics and Tony writes about what is happening on the UK classic car scene as well as reporting on our travels across Europe. Tony also writes occasional articles for UK magazines and appears in Jaguar Driver and TR Action club magazines as well as Total MG magazine.
As well as running The Open Road and writing magazine articles, Tony is active in the local tourist industry as a Director of South Warwickshire Tourism. He also runs his own management consultancy company - Consult ™ - specialising in delivering expert sales and marketing advice to small and medium sized businesses that don't have the resources to employ their own Sales or Marketing Director.
Now recognised as an expert in the classic car hire industry, Tony has developed and runs a quarterly course to help other people start up businesses hiring out classic cars.
Tony is so keen to promote interest in classic cars that he is now working closely with International Motor Sports (IMS) and has developed and runs the websites for their two main classic car runs; The Euroclassic and the re-instated Norwich Union run. See www.euro-classic.co.uk and www.msaclassic.co.uk . If you have never been on a Norwich Union run then click on the video link link below to see what you have missed.
