The Standard Motor Club tells us:
(All words and photographs from the Club).
The theme of this year’s Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show is ‘Debutantes’ and the Standard Motor Club has a great line-up for this year’s 3-day event, which runs from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 November 2026.
There will be two eye-catching ‘debutante’ cars on the Club stand which is in Hall 4, stand 4-555.
The first debutante and the oldest of the Club’s four exhibits is also one of the oldest cars in the Show. This is Lynda and the late Phil Homer’s 1921 Standard SLO (please see the heading photograph above, also the photograph below), to which Shaun Russell is just putting the finishing touches after a long restoration. The car’s last restoration was carried out over 60 years ago, when most of the cars at today’s Show were a just glint in their manufacturer’s eye! The car is being shown as a tribute to Phil, a long-serving Club member who died earlier this year, in July.
The other debutante, although not badged as a Standard, is Steve Naylor’s eye-catching 1957 Ten, badged as a Triumph Ten (photograph below).
Although American-badged Triumph Tens came out later than Steve’s car, which is an earlier Super Ten, there is a theory that Steve’s Coventry-registered car was used to test some of the features fitted to the Triumph Ten, such as Overdrive, Standrive semi-automatic transmission and other extras such as bonnet mascot, external sun-visor and anti-roll bar. Another theory is that the car was originally ordered by a Standard Motor Company worker who either specified the extras or did what Johnny Cash did in the 1976 song and removed them from the factory ‘One Piece At A Time’! The Triumph Ten was essentially a Standard Ten Gold Star with a few extras badged as a Triumph on the brochures for the American market.
This leads nicely on to the third car, Peter Lockley’s late 1957 Standard Eight Gold Star (photograph below), which has a similar grille and the same layout as all the Gold Star cars with an opening boot lid and fold-down rear seat which will enable it to bring into the show all the stand furniture, banners and the like as it has done on previous occasions.
Finally, Paul Dowson’s 1939 Standard Flying Eight (photograph below) last made an appearance at the NEC in 2015. It is the final pre-war model of the small Flying Standards which continued post-war as the 4/8A with a few variations. It has appeared at many wartime shows and has been a regular over many years at Coventry MotoFest where it always has pride of place on the Club display outside the Flying Standard pub which has an identical car on the pub sign and a similar earlier Flying Nine on the menu.
There will hopefully be another Standard on the Long Buckby (and surrounding villages) Vintage and Classic Vehicle Meet Stand in Hall 5, at stand 5-572, where Terry and Lynne Oxley’s 1937 Standard Flying Light Twelve will be one of several interesting vehicles on display.
For further information about the Standard Motor Club, including how to join, please go to:
https://www.standardmotorclub.org.uk/