MG 18/80 on display at the RAC in Pall Mall

Entrance to the RAC - first the team have to dismantle the revolving doors!

See a report on the MG 18/80 display on the MG Car Club's website. More

See the RAC website for more Rotunda display cars. More

Photo credits: 18/80 Andy Knott and ramp automobilemag.com website
Posted: 170923


The Royal Automobile Club in Central London offers lodging, restaurants, and recreation as well as meeting rooms to its 16,500 members in its grand building on the fashionable Pall Mall just a short walk from St James Palace. A surprising feature for many is that exhibiting cars in the RAC goes back to the 1960s when the Aston Martin DB5 for the James Bond movie ‘Goldfinger’ was first shown. Each week a different car is on display in the Rotunda, a circular room up a flight of stairs from the entrance hall by the Club's front door. But how do they get the cars in as exhibits?

Over the last week the car on display was an MG 18/80 and attending a dinner there last week to mark the display in the Rotunda, the RAC chairman Tom Perves explained how the display cars arrive at dawn on Monday morning, the existing exhibit is taken out and the replacement is brought up the stairs into the Rotunda.

How is it done? First the team have to dismantle the revolving doors that mark the pedestrian entrance to the Club, then put together a series of aluminium ramps across the pavement steps, into the building, and then up the flight of stairs into the Rotunda. A quite extraordinary exercise but the result is a regular flow of beautiful cars on display inside the building. More