In September 2022 we featured an article by Bronwen May about her experience as a first time driver on the Veteran Car Run. Since then, she has made the drive from London to Brighton twice more – most recently with an all-female crew. And she’ll be departing from Hyde Park on 3rd November this year with yet another crew of ladies. It’s a tradition she plans to maintain – and she has three daughters who look set to follow in her tyre tracks in due course.

My first experience of taking part in the Veteran Car Run was as a passenger, and it was with a female driver. I’ve known Joy Tacon for many years and she very kindly offered me a seat one year and I loved it. I thought it was wonderful and declared that I would really like to drive it myself one day.

That ‘one day’ started in 2020, when I was living in Hong Kong and we were under Covid quarantine regulations. Daniel Ward, who knew I had expressed a desire to drive on the Run, called me to tell me about a Cadillac which he thought I might like to buy for the event. Bolstered by a rather good bottle of wine I agreed – and woke the next day reflecting ‘that was brave of me’. The plan had been to drive the car on the 2020 Run, but that was cancelled because of the pandemic, so my first experience of driving on the famous route from London to Brighton came in 2021.

I was very, very scared, but we made it to the finish and I was hooked. I drove on the Run again in 2022. Famously, this was an exceptionally wet event, and I felt as if I sailed to Brighton. But the car made it with no problem; they’re incredible little machines.

In 2023, I decided that it would be wonderful to have an all-female crew.  There are some very knowledgeable and enthusiastic ladies who take part in the Run, such as Joy, who sits on the Steering Committee, but it’s fair to say that women drivers are outnumbered by the men. There didn’t seem to be any reason why this was the case, and I wanted to show my daughters how much fun it could be. So I did the event with two of my three daughters and my sister, Poppy. We did have one male on board however – Percy the puppy, who was too young to be left at home on his own!

My daughters and Poppy loved every minute, as did I, and I thought ‘I’m going to do this every year.” The reaction the all-female (plus Percy the puppy) crew got from the crowd was extraordinary and the whole thing was quite simply enormously enjoyable.

This year we’ve entered two Cadillacs into the Run. My husband, a male friend and my sister and a female friend are in one, and the other, which I’ll drive, is the all-female car. So six women and two men! My passengers will be all three of my daughters, Francesca, Henrietta and Daisy. One couldn’t come in 2023 because it was GCSE year, so this is her first experience of the event. 

One year, I’d like to do the Run with eight women across the two cars, though I think I’ll wait for my daughters to pass their driving tests first. They’re already learning to drive the veteran cars – not on public roads, obviously – and they’re very fond of them. I feel it’s really important to find ways to encourage young people to get involved with these absolutely fantastic machines, and especially young women. 

We did the Yorkshire Veteran Run with three women and one man in the car. It’s just so much fun. We all of us really enjoy it. We're not at all competitive, we take our time and it's just great, and you meet such interesting people. 

It’s huge fun watching my daughters on veteran events. Having done a few of them now, they take their comfort quite seriously, with their blankets and hot water bottles and, when we stop at the various pit stops, they’re straight to the back where tea and coffee is on offer, asking for hot water to fill their hot water bottles. On one occasion there was no hot water, so they had them filled with coffee instead! 

My interest in historic cars started from scratch and escalated quickly after that call during Covid. As well as the Cadillacs we also now have a ‘new’ car, in the form of a 1911 Talbot which, at the time of this interview we’re taking to Bilbao on a ferry for a tour across Spain and France. My husband doesn’t quite know what on earth has happened… I’ll suddenly start having a nice chat with a chap about carburettors… I love doing the driving, I love listening to the engines. I don’t know how I got the bug, I have no rational explanation as to how I got into it, but I really, really enjoy it. And it’s wonderful to see an upcoming generation of lady drivers for the Run in the form of my three daughters.