The Veteran Car Run leaves Serpentine Road in Hyde Park at 06:56 on Sunday 1 November 2026, the first car away at sunrise for the road to Brighton.
The first run was driven on a wet Saturday, 14 November 1896, organised by Harry John Lawson to celebrate the Locomotives on Highways Act, which had just exempted light motor vehicles from the restrictions that governed traction engines. It was called the Emancipation Run, and it opened with a breakfast at the Charing Cross Hotel at which Lord Winchelsea tore a red flag in two. The gesture was better theatre than history, since the requirement to walk ahead of a car with a flag had been repealed eighteen years earlier, but the name stuck and so did the journey.
Every car entered must have been built before 1905, which makes this the largest gathering of veteran cars anywhere. Tiller steering, chain drive, hand pumps for fuel pressure and brakes never designed to stop anything: crews start before dawn, drive in the open in November, and a good number do not reach Brighton. Thirty-seven cars started in 1927 and a hundred and thirty-one in 1938.
The 2026 run leaves Hyde Park at first light on Sunday 1 November and reaches Madeira Drive in Brighton across the day. The cars set off in a continuous stream rather than as a race, and there is no prize for arriving first. Anyone can stand anywhere on the route and watch, free, as the whole of the nineteenth century goes past at twenty miles an hour.