It started with a DM.
Not a flashy invite. Not a golden envelope. Just a quiet little message that felt too good to be true, an invite to Secret Meet. One of the UK’s most exclusive gatherings of hypercars, supercars, and the people who treat them like toys instead of vault investments.
I didn’t have anything fancy to drive there. No screaming V12, no carbon-clad missile, not even something with launch control. My partner’s e36 BMW is currently off the road, and my Subaru Forester has been pressed into being his tool-carrying car, so it had to stay home. Instead, I borrowed my mum’s BMW 1-series, a stubby little hatchback that gets pressed into service a few times a year, when my youngest brother returns for the summer holidays.
Two hours on the road to Silverstone stretched into two and a half thanks to my own inability to avoid the scenic route. I didn’t mind. The Cotswolds, in all their rolling smugness, were golden that morning. I was on my way to see something a little bit stupid. I was going to Secret Meet.
When I arrived, it was madness. I let a convoy of cars go ahead of me on the roundabout. Porsche, Ferrari, McLaren. A Jag E-type pulled in-front of me into the queue. Car-spotters swarmed over the Silverstone entrance area. No photos taken of the 1-series, camera lenses turned away from the scruffy little silver diesel.
I followed into the circuit the kind of cars you normally only see on instagram. Except here, they were being used. Not wrapped up in bubble wrap, sitting on museum shelves. You don’t realise how much you’ve missed real noise until you’re standing in the pit lane and a GT3 car howls past like it’s just stolen something.
There was a kind of theatre to it all, cars I’d never afford, driven by people I’ll never be. Celebrities wandered past me in the paddock, chatting to friends. Nobody batted an eyelid. It wasn’t pretentious. Maybe because the real ones, the drivers, the engineers, the nerds crouched around carbon splitters with spanners and focus, weren’t there to show off. They were there to drive.
That was the thing. This day wasn’t a showroom flex. These cars weren’t babied or trailered in just to pose for photos and disappear again under silk covers. They were here to run. They were covered in front-end flies, one F40 had fingermarks in it’s road dust.
Sorry, did I say one F40? 8 F40s. There were 8 Ferrari F40s here to be driven. I think 8. I lost count. I mean sure, maybe they originally bought them as an investment. Maybe there’s a vault with more just like it, climate-controlled and polished with unicorn tears. But these ones? As the organising club’s name says, were being driven: Supercar Driver Club.
Same with the Carrera GTs, the old GT1s, the V12 Lambos yawning wide into corners with the kind of miniature body roll that lets you feel every ounce of their engine’s weight. These weren’t museum pieces. These were monsters with mileage. And every single one of them looked happier caked in brake dust than tucked away behind glass.
That joy, it wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t something you had to squint to see. It was loud. It was in the way owners leaned against pit walls, grinning like kids at Christmas. The way bunches of people did that little half run half walk over the pit-lane to look through the mesh at the track when something made a great noise. It was in the pit crews stacking wheels in the tyre warmers. It was in the guy next to me yelling “YES!” as a trio of classic race cars hammered down the finish straight.
I overheard: “We look forward to this event all year, amazing how it’s grown.“
And what hit me then, hard and honest, was that the joy I’d felt in my mum’s clattery diesel on the way here. The fun of heel-toeing through the Cotswolds, windows down, radio off, chasing apexes at entirely legal speeds, wasn’t different. Not lesser. Just wearing different shoes. Mine were scuffed Adidas, theirs; Dior (or Sparco!).
That’s what driving is. It’s not price tags or torque curves or whatever silly horsepower arms race the internet’s shouting about this week. It’s the grin. It’s the spark. It’s the reason someone brings the only McLaren MP4 12C Can-Am (Chassis No.1, I saw the plaque) to the track and doesn’t just park it up for clout. It’s the same thing that makes a teenager in a beat-up Saxo wake up at 6am just to go for a drive before work.
It’s love. Pure, impractical, oil-stained, rev-chasing love.
Hatchbacks taught us that. They were the freedom you could afford. They were sticky pedals and crusty cupholders and the exact kind of joy that doesn’t survive accounting meetings. They were how we started. How we figured out what grip felt like. How we learned to rev-match with the radio off and our mates heckling us from the back seat. They were rubbish and brilliant and ours. I’m sure America has an equivalent.
That’s why when I walked back to the car park, exhausted and sunburnt, it wasn’t the low slung super and hypercars basking in the evening sun that stopped me in my tracks. It was the little Lancia Delta HF “Evoluzione”. Black. Dusty. Square. Sitting there quietly, like it had nothing to prove, but everything to say.
Every single driver there would respect that little hatchback and the joy it brings. That’s the heartbeat, right there. That’s what all of this is about.
Not the stats. Not the badge. Not the money.
Just the drive.
