Salon Privé has marked a notable shift in concours culture by naming two Best of Show winners for the first time in its 21-year history.
At Blenheim Palace, a 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S took the traditional Concours d’Elégance crown, while a 1995 McLaren F1 became the first recipient of the newly introduced Concours d’Excellence award.
The split result neatly captures where the collector-car world now stands, with blue-chip classics and modern performance icons increasingly sharing the same serious attention.
At a glance
- Salon Privé named both a 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S and a 1995 McLaren F1 as Best of Show winners.
- The Miura won the Concours d’Elégance, while the McLaren F1 inaugurated the new Concours d’Excellence category for modern collector cars.
- One of the two winners will progress to the Peninsula Classics Best of the Best in January 2027.
A Miura victory in its 60th anniversary spotlight
The winning Lamborghini appeared in The Italian Job – 60 Years of the Lamborghini Miura, a class built around one of the most influential shapes in post-war motoring.
Owned by Amir Ravan and the RLC Collection, the P400 S impressed the judges not only as an object of design but as a carefully presented example of a car that helped define the mid-engined supercar template.
The Miura’s appeal has never rested on novelty alone.
Its low-slung proportions, transverse V12 layout and Marcello Gandini design still have the ability to stop a lawn full of exceptional cars in its tracks.
Ravan credited Tom Hartley Junior and his team for the detailed restoration work carried out over four years, framing the car’s win as a matter of custodianship as much as ownership.
The McLaren F1 gives modern icons their own stage
Terry Bramall’s 1995 McLaren F1 made its own kind of history by winning the first Salon Privé Best of Show Concours d’Excellence award.
The F1 competed in Poster Cars – Icons from Our Youth, a class created for the early supercars that shaped the imagination of a generation and now sit firmly inside the collector-car establishment.
The new award recognises limited-edition supercars and hypercars as a distinct category rather than asking them to sit awkwardly within traditional concours expectations.
That distinction matters because a car such as the F1 is judged as much by engineering intent, preservation and cultural significance as by the older codes of coachbuilt elegance.
Bramall described the win as overwhelming, while paying tribute to Gordon Murray’s design and the restoration expertise of Lanzante.
How Salon Privé judged two eras of excellence
The 2026 competition brought together 70 cars across 12 classes, spanning almost a century of automotive design, engineering and collecting taste.
International judges led by Chief Judge Nigel Matthews and Assistant Chief Judge Chris Kramer assessed the field over two days of competition.
For the contemporary collector-car classes, Salon Privé used the M100 judging system, a 100-point framework created for modern performance cars.
It offers a more appropriate lens for cars whose value lies in advanced engineering, design integrity and condition rather than the same criteria used for much older machinery.
Salon Privé co-founder and chairman Andrew Bagley positioned the double award as a reflection of the market’s evolution, with great classics remaining central while modern supercars and hypercars gain a more formal place in the concours world.
Runner-up honours and notable entries
The Concours d’Elégance runner-up was Billy Hibbs’ Maserati 3500GT Spyder Prototipo by Vignale.
In the Concours d’Excellence field, Gregor Piech’s Porsche 918 Coupé Sonderwunsch finished runner-up.
The Chairman’s Award went to Jane Dyke’s Porsche Pre-A Speedster by Reutter, while Most Exceptional Coachwork was awarded to Bill and Nichole Lyon’s Duesenberg SJ Speedster by Gurney Nutting.
The field also included an Armstrong-Siddeley Special Six, Maserati 8C 3000, Alfa Romeo Sprint Berlinetta, an early Porsche 356 Split Window Coupé, Aston Martin DB3S, Bizzarrini 5300GT, Ferrari 250 GT Series 1 Cabriolet and Bugatti EB110 Prototype.
More recent performance machinery was represented by cars including the Aston Martin Valiant Prototype, Bugatti Bolide, Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 Prototype 1 and the 2025 Rimac Nevera Time Attack.
The Rimac’s appearance was especially notable as the first fully electric car to compete in the Salon Privé Concours.
One of the two Best of Show winners will now move forward as a finalist for the Peninsula Classics Best of the Best in January 2027, where it will be judged against leading concours winners from events including Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, Cavallino Classic and The Quail.
For Salon Privé, the shared crown feels less like a compromise than a statement of intent, acknowledging that the collector-car canon is expanding without losing sight of the machines that built it.
