Our favourite motors from the Heveningham Hall Concours D’Elégance this year.

This past weekend saw the second Concours d’Elégance at Heveningham Hall, a beautiful Palladian mansion in the English county of Suffolk. Heveningham sits in 5,000 acres of parkland designed by the UK’s 18th-century landscape genius Mr Lancelot “Capability” Brown, but however attractive the setting, for one weekend a year the house and gardens take a back seat as an unrivalled collection of boys’ toys are parked on the lawns. Some petrol heads admire machines with four wheels, while others prefer them with two wings. Heveningham caters for both, but our attention focused on the extraordinary selection of cars in the Concours d’Elégance. These ranged from the antique elegance of a sublime 1934 Alfa Romeo Tipo B P3, to the contemporary beauty of a Ferrari LaFerrari. Performance cars of all ages, and from different countries, featured, from definitively English machines like Aston Martins and Bentleys, to quintessentially American cars including a Shelby Cobra and a Ford GT40.

However, for us the stars of the event were the famous sports cars from Modena in Northern Italy, and while the latest models were on show, including an incredible new LaFerrari Aperta, it was the vintage cars that best seemed to embody the spirit of the event. Perhaps what distinguished them is the knowledge that they were built in the years when Mr Enzo Ferrari himself ran the company, or perhaps it’s simply down to their unrivalled beauty.

Is it possible to think of a more desirable way to get about than driving a classic, open-top Ferrari? Probably not, particularly if it’s got a V12 engine and comes in an understated shade of metallic grey. Just looking at it makes us wonder about the clothes a man would need to wear to live up to this machine (we’re thinking softly tailored double-breasted linen suit, no socks, unlined loafers and a shirt with an open lido collar). And does it matter that Ferrari’s latest V12 GT car, the new 812 Superfast, has more than three times the power of the 250 (789 BHP vs the 250’s 240 BHP)? Not in the slightest, which is presumably why, with a value of about £1.2m, this 250 is worth about five times more than the new 812 Superfast.

The 212 was presented as a racing car at the Brussels Motor Show in 1951, and its modestly-sized 2.5 litre motor consists of 12 busy little cylinders in an engine designed by Mr Gioacchino Colombo; in the world of vintage Ferraris, even the engineers get a name check. This car was delivered to its first buyer, Italian aristocrat Count Giulio D’Aqcuarone, as a fixed head (known as a Vignale Coupe), but after two years the Count took the car back to coach builders Vignale and asked them to cut it down to a Barchetta. This word means “little boat”, and refers to an Italian two-seater open top racing car. What’s so striking about the 212 is its purity. Despite its astounding looks, it’s incredibly basic, having been designed with only one thing in mind: the speed with which it can get around a racing track.

The 250 followed Ferrari’s 212 and has, in its different iterations, gone on to become a true motoring icon, not least because when Hollywood director Mr John Hughes cast a car in his 1980s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it was a 250 GT California. However, the most desirable version is the fixed-head SWB, which was designed for racing as the shortened wheel base improved the car’s handling. Then, as now, Ferrari pushed at the limits of engineering to improve performance – although back in 1961, that meant that disk brakes replaced drum brakes for the first time. We hugely admire the fact that this car is still raced by its owner, given that its value is around £8 million.

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