But giving my boat the most buoyancy is tucked around the back, in a rather smaller, more ramshackle shed built out of a former war department canteen by an Austin 7 enthusiast and special builder called Jack French. He was a founder of the 750 Motor Club some 75 years ago, and he built a special called Simplicity, which is still around today, before spreading the word about how he made it. Lots of people listened, and it gave birth to a motorsport revolution.
If you’re looking for the roots of what makes Britain the global home of motorsport and motorsport engineering that it is today, it’s nuggets such as this workshop, rediscovered in 2013 next to French’s former cottage, saved from the bulldozers, dismantled and then reassembled at the Atwell-Wilson Museum. It’s a sensational fragment of history.
Bennett tells me they’re better at this sort of thing than they are at marketing the museum itself. But it’s really busy with events and club visits, and it gets more than 5000 visitors a year, so they’re doing something right.
With the sun bright overhead, I say cheerio and head on to somewhere I know doesn’t want for visitors on a day like this: Bourton-on-the-Water, which is only 40 miles from Calne. You can make it a pleasant drive on good roads, so I do. Photographer Jack Harrison needs to take a few pictures anyway.
And I like the car. It has been a while since I drove any Corsa, which is down to circumstance rather than prejudice, but it’s another reminder of how much I enjoy small cars. At 4060mm long and 1765mm wide, the Corsa is firmly in what I consider to be the supermini size bracket, and they’re all five-door models these days.
By coincidence, Harrison is driving a manual, unhybridised Corsa, which will later give me a chance to sample the difference between that, at 1175kg, and the hybrid, at 1267kg. Sub-1300kg is still not a great deal, all told, so I’m getting quite into it on B-roads. It has what feels like quite high lateral limits, decent agility and a willing enough powertrain. Before long, though, I’m on a duller, busier road into Bourton.
I wonder how heavily Bourton gets marketed overseas, this ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’, because it clearly makes it onto foreign visitors’ tourist trails. Seemingly all of them, all at the same time today, so much so that although the Cotswold Motoring Museum is busy, it still feels like a haven from the wildness of Bourton central, which has people milling around it in a similar population density to that of Waterloo station on a Friday evening, but with more paddling and ice creams.
