Salon Privé 2026: modern hypercars get their own Best of Show

Blenheim Palace is hosting Salon Privé from 2 to 6 September, and this year the judges did something the event had not done in twenty-one years: they awarded two Best of Show trophies instead of one.

The first went to the Concours d'Élégance, for cars built through 2000 — the coachbuilt, the prewar, the Glorious GTs, judged the way concours cars have always been judged. The second went to a new category called the Concours d'Excellence, reserved for collector supercars and hypercars built from 2001 onward. Seventy cars took the field. Judging ran across the 2nd and 3rd, with the trophies handed out at the gala dinner on Thursday evening.

Splitting the top award is an administrative decision on paper. In practice it is a museum deciding which room a thing belongs in, and it settles an argument the collector market has been having for most of a decade.

What actually changed at Blenheim

Two new classes were added alongside the traditional ones: Limited Production Supercars, covering 1996 to 2026, and Hypercar Heaven, covering 2006 to 2026. Both are scored on the M100 system rather than the originality-weighted scoring a prewar Bugatti gets. That distinction matters more than the name suggests.

Traditional concours judging is largely an audit of correctness. Is the hardware period-correct, is the finish the finish the factory applied, has anything been replaced with a part the car did not leave with. It is an excellent way to evaluate a 1936 Delahaye and a fairly poor way to evaluate a Bugatti Bolide, which has no period to be correct to and whose engineering is the point. A modern hypercar is judged on what it is, not on how faithfully it has been kept as what it was.

That is the substance of the change. Salon Privé chairman Andrew Bagley framed it publicly as recognition that the cars defining the turn of the millennium are now being taken seriously on their own terms — which is a polite way of saying the 2001-and-newer cars had outgrown the exhibition lawn.

Why 2001 is a defensible dividing line

Pick any cutoff and someone will argue with it. This one holds up better than most.

The early 2000s are when the limited-run supercar stopped being a halo car and started being a financial instrument built in a known quantity. The Enzo arrived in 2002 at 400 units. The Carrera GT followed in 2004. Pagani had already established that a car could be sold on craftsmanship and rarity rather than volume. From that point forward the run number was announced at launch, allocation became a currency, and the cars were bought by people who understood exactly what they were buying.

Those cars are now twenty to twenty-five years old. That is roughly the age at which the concours world has historically started paying attention to anything. The difference is that this generation arrived pre-documented, pre-numbered, and in many cases pre-appreciated. The lawn is catching up to a market that got there first.

The entry list is the actual argument

According to Boat International's preview of the field, the modern classes brought a Ferrari Daytona SP3, a Pagani Utopia, Bugatti and Koenigsegg entries, and a five-day Koenigsegg showcase running alongside a Bugatti-and-Pagani "Battle of the Hypercars" display.

Three entries are worth naming individually.

1. Rimac Nevera Time Attack — the first fully electric car to compete in the Salon Privé concours. Whatever position you hold on electric performance cars, an EV being judged rather than displayed is a threshold event, and it happened this week.
2. Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 Prototype 1 — the original development car, not a customer example. Prototypes are where the modern-classic argument is strongest, because provenance is the whole story and there is nothing to restore.
3. BMW Skytop — one of fifty built, with two expected in the UK. A car whose entire claim is that it exists in small numbers and looks the way it looks.

My Car Heaven's account of the split puts the reasoning plainly: the collector car market has changed, and a single Best of Show could no longer describe it.

What this means if you photograph modern cars

A modern hypercar is harder to shoot well than a prewar classic, and most people photographing them have not adjusted for it.

A 1950s body is a few large, forgiving surfaces. Light lands, wraps, and leaves. A Utopia or a Nevera is thirty small surfaces at competing angles, with active aero, ducting, and gloss carbon that reads as a black hole in one frame and a mirror in the next. The same three-quarter setup that flatters a Ferrari 250 will produce a mess of clipped highlights and dead shadow on anything built after 2010.

Four things that consistently help:

• Overcast, or the last forty minutes of light. Hard midday sun on complex bodywork gives you a hundred specular hits and no form. Diffusion is doing the work a simpler shape used to do for free.
• Circular polarizer, and actually rotate it. On gloss carbon it is the difference between reading weave and reading glare. Give up a stop and a half and take it.
• Drop the camera. Chest height flattens modern proportion. Sill height restores the stance the designer drew, and it puts the sky reflection where you want it rather than where the tripod put it.
• Grade for the paint, not the scene. Modern finishes carry pigment that generic presets crush. The approach in our Lightroom color grading workflow applies directly — protect the panel, then build the rest of the frame around it.

Documenting the car before the lawn gets to it

Here is the part that is relevant beyond the trophy.

Every car judged at Blenheim this week has a file behind it. Photographs, service records, event history, the evidence of what it has been and where it has been. For a prewar car that file was assembled decades after the fact, by people reconstructing a history nobody thought to record. For a 2003 Enzo it was assembled in real time, by owners who understood that documentation is part of the asset.

That process is happening right now for cars that are not on any concours field yet. A 512 TR at a Sunday meet in San Diego is not a concours entry in 2026. In 2041 it may well be, and the photographic record of it will have been made by whoever bothered to make it — which is the argument behind frames like Testarossa · The Meet and Ferrari Convoy sitting in the archive rather than on a hard drive.

The other thing worth saying: concours photography documents a car at rest, cleaned, on grass, surrounded by people. That is one useful record. It is not the interesting one. A rolling shot documents the car doing the thing it was engineered to do, at speed, in a real place, and there is far less of that in existence than there is lawn photography. We have made the case for rolling shots over statics before, and a week in which modern supercars were formally admitted to the concours world is a decent time to make it again. The judging lawn will always be there. The car being driven is the harder frame and the rarer one.

If your car is going to be somebody's file one day, it is worth starting that file properly.