Some dates on the calendar justify a six o’clock alarm. Supercar Sunday at Grantley Hall is one of them. Supercar Driver and the hotel have built this into the strongest gathering in the northern calendar, and this year we brought six cars from stock. Sophie Ellis-Bextor closed the day from a stage on the lawn. It rained hard for a good stretch of the afternoon and cleared later, which changed nothing about the turnout: between midday and the last set, the grounds of a five-star hotel outside Ripon filled with machinery most people only ever see in photographs.
What we took
The stand was anchored by a Ferrari SF90 XX Stradale, a 2024 car showing 120 miles. Ferrari built 799 coupés and 599 Spiders, and this one came in Bianco Artico with Flash Orange accents. The numbers are the easy part: 1,016hp, from a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 working with three electric motors. What makes it worth walking round twice is the fixed rear wing, the first Ferrari has fitted to a road car since the F50. Hold that thought, because two F50s turned up later in the day.
Alongside it sat a 2022 McLaren 765LT Spider in Supernova Silver with McLaren Orange pinstriping. McLaren capped the Spider at 765 cars to match the coupé, and the 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 makes 765PS. LT cars have held their value better than almost anything else in the modern McLaren range, and the Spider is the rarer half of the pair in practice, because it arrived after the coupé had already sold out.
The crowd favourite was the Aston Martin Vanquish Volante, satin silver over exposed carbon. Aston’s new 5.2-litre twin-turbo V12 puts out 835PS and 1,000Nm here, enough for 214mph, which makes it the fastest and most powerful open-top production car the company has built. Sixty years of the Volante name, and this is the one that finally outruns the coupés that came before it.
Next to it, the Bentley Continental GT Speed First Edition. Worth being precise about this one: it is the fourth-generation car, not a facelift of the last one. Bentley’s Ultra Performance Hybrid pairs the 4.0-litre V8 with a 190PS electric motor for 782PS and 1,000Nm, which makes it the most powerful Bentley ever built, and it will still do fifty miles on the battery alone. Completing the six were a McLaren 750S in orange and a 992 Porsche 911 GT3 RS in black.
The hypercar contingent
Beyond our stand, it was easier to list what wasn’t there. Three Bugattis, two Chirons and a Veyron 16.4, sat on the lawns. The most interesting car of the lot was arguably the Rimac Nevera Time Attack, one of twelve built to mark the records the Nevera set in 2023, out of a total Nevera run of 150. Pagani were represented by one of the best-known Huayras in the country.
The analogue era held its own
For all the four-figure power figures, the heart of the show sat two decades back. A pair of Ferrari 599 GTOs and an SLR McLaren drew steady crowds all afternoon, but the car that stopped people was a Murciélago LP670-4 SuperVeloce. Sant’Agata planned 350 of them. The financial crisis and the arrival of the Aventador meant only 186 left the factory, which makes the SV rarer than the Murciélago’s reputation as a volume car suggests, and the last of the truly analogue V12 Lamborghinis.
Rarity, and then some
Fernando Alonso’s fingerprints were on the day too. The Valiant he commissioned from Q by Aston Martin is limited to 38 cars, all allocated before the first deliveries, and it keeps the 5.2-litre twin-turbo V12 at 745PS with a six-speed manual driving the rear wheels. The example here was green with gold stripes and gold wheels, matched to the owner’s Valhalla, which was parked alongside it on the entrance drive.
For the classic side, an unusually original Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster shared the grass with two Aston Martin DB5s, a Singer-reimagined 911, and a pair of Lamborghini Diablo VT Roadsters. The VT Roadster was the only open-top Diablo Lamborghini ever put into series production, so two of them on one lawn is not a common sight.
Then the halo Ferraris
Five SF90 XX Stradales were dotted around the venue, along with an original Dino 246 GT and three 430 Scuderias. The moment, though, belonged to Maranello’s older order: two Ferrari F50s within sight of each other, three F40s parked in close proximity, and an Enzo further along the same line.
The F50 timing was hard to ignore. Three weeks before the show, a 1996 F50 sold at Mecum’s Monterey sale for $14.58m, the most anyone has paid for one at auction, with an RM Sotheby’s car going for $12.1m the same week. Two years ago the model’s record sat near $5.5m. As for the F40s, spotting one usually stops you where you stand. Three of them framed by the Yorkshire countryside was something else.
The venue does half the work
Grantley Hall earns its place in this. The hall sits on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales five miles west of Ripon, built by Thomas Norton in the early eighteenth century and listed Grade II*. Its Japanese garden, laid out in 1910 and separately listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, is among the most important of its type in the country. After a four-year restoration it opened as a hotel for the first time in 2019, having previously been a private house and then a council-run college. Spread cars of this calibre across the entrance drive and the rear lawns of 38 acres of that, and you have a backdrop no exhibition hall can match.
Why we keep coming back
For the team at Redline Specialist Cars, Supercar Sunday is never just a stand. It is a day among the people who actually own and drive these cars, and the conversations are worth as much as the display. This was my fourth year attending with Redline, which made it a good one to stand back and take in. Rare engineering, good company, and a proper Yorkshire afternoon.
If you are looking for something along these lines, or you have one to sell, our sales team is always happy to talk.
