An active community, social media superstars and renowned London streets are the key to a good day’s spotting
My phone buzzes. It’s a new piece of intel: my target has been sighted moving past Hyde Park Corner.
That’s about half a mile from where I’m standing, outside the old US embassy in a cold, dark Grosvenor Square. My source hasn’t seen which way it has gone, though.
It could be heading up onto Park Lane and into Mayfair proper, which would make sense, as it was seen near the prestigious Connaught Hotel last night. But then again, didn’t someone post a photo of it outside Harrods the other day? Hmm.
The traffic at this time of night is awful, and I can probably cut him off if I can make it down to Green Park and take the tube to Knightsbridge.
This could almost be the introduction to a slightly rubbish spy novel, but in reality it’s just how I used to spend my Saturdays as a 16-year-old: running around the West End with the camera I spent my first pay cheque on, in pursuit of the most outrageous automotive exotica I could find.
On this occasion it was a Pagani Zonda, but the week before it would have been a Koenigsegg CCX, or maybe an Aston Martin One-77. This was what proper car spotting was all about.
I grew up in Dorset and became aware of the plethora of supercars crawling around London through various social media pages, but it took a few months to convince my dad to take me for a wander up to Knightsbridge.
As soon as we left the tube station, me with my Samsung tablet in hand to capture what we saw, we found a Ferrari California. “Aren’t you going to take a photo of that?” my dad asked.
I responded that it probably wasn’t worth it (memory cards weren’t what they are now) and had only a few seconds to wait for vindication when we rounded the next corner and stumbled across a cream Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport.
That day, following a map I’d drawn up based on the locations of cars I’d seen online, we came across the first Pagani Huayra in the country, a Mercedes-Benz G63 6×6 and even a street-parked Ferrari F40, among others. I was hooked.
Amazingly, that would turn out to be a fairly poor haul by the standards I would later become accustomed to.
I was back the next summer and immediately spotted a white LaFerrari sandwiched between a then brand-spanking-new Ferrari F12tdf and a one-of-three Veyron Vitesse Rembrandt outside an exceedingly fancy hotel. Result.
It wasn’t just the cars that appealed, though: I became part of a tight-knit community of like-minded supercar spotters.
Messages would circulate about certain cars likely to be out at a certain time in a certain place, and we would all dust off our lenses and sprint over there.
Highlights? Chasing a Koenigsegg Agera RS, a Huayra BC and a trio of Pagani Zondas flanked by a Porsche 918 Spyder, a LaFerrari and one of only four Ferrari Enzos finished in Nero Daytona was hard to top but I’d been given a heads-up on them, so it wasn’t a surprise.
The real treats were the complete shocks, like when a Ferrari 275 GTB/4 just happened to swan past Knightsbridge tube station, or when I caught a road-legal McLaren Senna GTR cruising through Berkeley Square.
Stand on the right corner in the capital and there’s always a great chance of seeing something truly special, which means every day can basically be a car show. You just have to hope the Piccadilly line is running without delays.
