I have stood on the grass at Pebble Beach, lost whole afternoons at Hampton Court, and frozen half to death at Goodwood. So when I tell you that the 2026 Royal Bahrain Concours now belongs on that list, understand that I do not say it lightly. I was there, on the lawns of the Royal Golf Club in Riffa, for both days, and I came home convinced I had watched the Gulf’s finest concours grow up in real time. This is my full, first-person account of the second Royal Bahrain Concours. Every class, every major winner, the cars that stopped me dead, and one or two moments I will be keeping for a long while. What the Royal Bahrain Concours is, and why it matters The Royal Bahrain Concours is the GCC’s premier Concours d’Elegance, and 2026 was only its second edition, held on 6 and 7 November at the Royal Golf Club in Riffa. It runs under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain, and it is organised by Thorough Events, the British team behind the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court Palace and the London Concours. That pedigree is written all over it. What was a one-day debut last year grew into a two-day event this time, built around roughly 70 invited concours cars with more than 200 machines from the region’s leading car clubs filling the rest of the field. There was a new broadcast platform, RBC TV, a judging panel pulled from the serious end of the magazine world, and a feeling, everywhere you walked, that Bahrain has decided to do this properly. It shows in the details, and the details, as anyone in my line of work will tell you, are the whole game. The judges, and why they gave this edition its teeth A concours is only as credible as the people holding the clipboards, and the 2026 panel had real weight. Octane editor-in-chief James Elliott and Classic & Sports Car’s Alastair Clements led a line-up that included filmmaker Manish Pandey, the man who wrote Senna, alongside Arjun Oberoi of India’s Oberoi Concours, Victor Jennes and Justine Maison of Le Driviste, and curators Flavien and Vanessa Marçais. Chairman James Brooks-Ward and vice-chairman Amer AlKhan set the tone, and the tone was no-nonsense. These were not rosettes handed out for turning up. The best of Show Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR at the Royal Bahrain Concours, 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors Best of Show: the 1999 Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Let me start where the day ended, because it deserves it. Best of Show went to Dr. Khalid M. Abdulrahim’s 1999 Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR, and if you know your homologation specials you already understand why the room went quiet when it was announced. The CLK GTR is arguably the maddest road-legal car ever signed off by a major manufacturer, a GT1 racer that Mercedes was forced to civilise for the street to go racing, of which a tiny handful were ever built. To see one at all is an event. To see a concours-condition example take the top prize on a lawn in Riffa tells you precisely the level this field is now playing at. Dr. Abdulrahim had a monster of a weekend, incidentally, also taking first in Sports and Race Classics with the same CLK GTR and second with a 2005 Maserati MC12, its Le Mans-bred cousin. Two of the rarest competition cars of their era, one owner, one tent. A silver McLaren F1 belonging to the crown prince of Bahrain, Royal Bahrain Concours, 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. The Hypercars class, and the Crown Prince’s McLaren F1 If the CLK GTR was the head, the McLaren F1 was the heart. The Hypercars class was won by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa’s 1997 McLaren F1, and here is the detail I cannot stop thinking about. He has owned it from new. In a world where these cars now change hands for tens of millions and most have been flipped a dozen times, the Crown Prince simply bought his, as a younger man, and kept it. Two Carrera GT cars, both matte finished, standing next to each other at the Royal Bahrain Concours in November, 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. The story I was told on the lawn, and I will relay it with a grin because it was relayed to me with one, is that a house was quietly sold to fund the purchase, a decision his father apparently learned about rather later. If you have ever wondered what genuine, uncut car passion looks like at the very highest level, there it is. No investment thesis, no allocation games, just a man who wanted the greatest car of its generation and found a way. Behind the F1 came Tawfiq Al Aali’s 2022 Ferrari Daytona SP3 and Adel Rajab’s 2024 Gordon Murray T.50s, which is a rather lovely bit of symmetry, Gordon Murray’s masterpiece sitting two places behind the car that made his name. A lineup of Ferrari's Six Halo models - the 288, F40, F50, Enzo, LaFerrari, and F80 on grass at the Royal Bahrain Concours, 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. The Big Six: a Ferrari holy trinity, and then some The headline curated class was Big Six, six of the most significant Ferraris ever built gathered on one stretch of lawn, and the podium alone was enough to make a grown enthusiast forget his own name. First place, correctly, went to the 288 GTO. Second, the F50. Third, the F40. Read that order again, because it is the entire modern Ferrari story told in three cars, and whoever judged it understood exactly what they were looking at. Let me take them in turn, because they deserve it. The 288 GTO is the one that lit the fuse, a twin-turbocharged, Kevlar-bodied homologation special built for a Group B championship that died before it could race, of which just 272 were ever made. It is the great-grandfather of every Ferrari halo car that followed, and it is rarer than all of them. The F40 behind it needs no introduction and gets none from me, the first production car to break 200 miles per hour, Enzo’s final signature, and still the most gloriously unhinged thing the factory has ever sold. And the F50, the one the internet still foolishly sleeps on, is a detuned Grand Prix V12 bolted directly to your spine, 349 built, the last truly analog Ferrari before the electronics arrived. A close up of the Ferrari F80, Ferrari's newest Halo car in its lineup. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. To see the three of them within arm’s reach of one another, drawn from the collections of Dr. Khalid M. Abdulrahim and Nabeel Nooruddin, is to see the complete sentence of Ferrari’s golden era punctuated in carbon and steel. I did several laps. I am not ashamed to admit I did them slowly. A line of Exotic italian cars on grass at the Royal Bahrain Concours 2026. They had organized this section by country, there was one for Germany, America, Japan, and Italy. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. Walking the classes: the winners, lawn by lawn The strength of a concours is in its depth, not just its top prize, and Riffa was deep. A few that I keep replaying. In European Classics, Isa Abdulrahim’s 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing took first, with the Crown Prince’s own 1961 300 SL Roadster second and a 1967 Lamborghini 400 GT third. Two 300 SLs on one lawn is a flex most European events cannot manage. Modern Classics was a quiet triumph for the underdogs, led by a 1994 Jaguar XJ220, the most unfairly maligned supercar of its generation finally getting its flowers, ahead of a 2013 Aston Martin V12 Zagato and a 2017 Vanquish Zagato. Flat Tops gave us the weird and wonderful, won by a 1988 Italdesign Aztec from a private collection, with a 2021 Ferrari Monza SP1 second and an Aston Martin V12 Speedster third. The Aztec is a Giugiaro fever dream and I adore it. Supercars went the way of a 2006 Porsche Carrera GT, with Dawood Al Gosaibi’s Gulf-liveried 2006 Ford GT second and a 2008 Lamborghini Reventón third. British Classics crowned a 2000 Aston Martin V600 Le Mans, American Classics was swept almost single-handedly by Sh. Ahmed bin Ali Al Khalifa, and Pre-1940 was led by a majestic 1939 Packard. The special awards carried their own stories. The Patron’s Award went to Faisal bin Laden’s 1985 Audi Sport Quattro, a Group B icon, and there was a standalone nod to a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Black Series. Bentleys, Horchs, a Stutz Bearcat II, a Chinese Eye Silver Cloud, a Maserati MC12, a Daytona SP3. I am still catching my breath. The Silver Shadow owned by the Khalifa Family from new since 1966, finished in a vibrant shade of yellow. The Sheikh took great pleasure in walking us through the beauty. Behind it is the cream Chinese Eye Rolls that won best in class. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. The provenance moment: a 1966 Rolls-Royce with a story If the Ferraris were the noise, this was the soul, and it took the Steering Committee Award on merit. A 1966 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, but not the saloon you are picturing. This was the two-door, the elegant, impossibly rare coupé bodied by H.J. Mulliner, Park Ward, the house formed when Rolls-Royce’s two greatest coachbuilders merged and started producing the finest hand-finished bodies in Britain. The two-door Shadow is the car that would eventually become the Corniche, and a 1966 example is about as early and as special as they come. Here is the part that undid me. His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa walked us through it himself, because it is his family’s car. Delivered new to His Excellency Sheikh Khalifa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, and never once out of the family since. Sixty years, one household, every chapter accounted for, narrated from memory by the man whose family has kept it. I untangle provenance for a living, the slow, forensic business of proving who owned what and when and why it matters. And here was a crown prince doing it off the cuff, on a car that has never had to leave home to prove a single thing about itself. That is provenance in its purest, uncuttable form. You cannot buy it, you cannot fake it, and you certainly cannot restore it back into existence once it is gone. I could have listened for the rest of the afternoon. Crown Prince Sheikh Salman Al Khalifa leafing through our book, The F1rst Edition, while sitting down to grab a bite to eat. Chris Bull, Director of the Showroom, sits next to him, answering questions. Photo:Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. A moment I will keep: presenting The F1rst Edition I will permit myself one properly personal note, because moments like this do not come around often. It was our great privilege, on behalf of everyone at F1rst Motors, to present His Royal Highness the Crown Prince with the inaugural copy of our new periodic coffee table book, The F1rst Edition. Crown Prince Sheikh Salman Al Khalifa leafing through our book, The F1rst Edition, while sitting down to grab a bite to eat. Chris Bull, Director of the Showroom, sits next to him, answering questions. Photo:Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. The book exists for one reason, and it is the same reason I do this job at all. The belief that a great car is really a great story, and that the story deserves to be set down properly, on good paper, with the provenance intact, rather than left to fade in a conversation nobody wrote down. To place the very first copy of that first volume into the hands of someone who so plainly lives and breathes this world, a genuine custodian rather than a collector of trophies, was humbling in a way I did not quite expect. I have handed over a lot of things across a lot of forecourts. I will remember this one for a very long time. Three neoclassical Land Rover cars — two defenders and a rangie on grass outside the Solihull's booth at the Royal Bahrain Concours 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. Beyond the main field: the Gulf’s next generation Here is the detail that will stay with me longest, and it has nothing to do with the seven-figure metal. It is who was standing next to it. I made a point of talking to owners all weekend, and again and again the person beside the car was somewhere between 28 and 40. Not the stereotype of the silver-haired collector guarding his investment, but young men and women who had chased the car down, learned it inside out, and turned up to share it. The Thirty Under 30 class, backed by BBK, put that energy front and centre, and the Restomod & Modified and 4x4 Trailblazers classes, along with the 200-odd cars from the region’s clubs, gave the whole thing a pulse that a lot of older, grander events have quietly lost. And it reframed something I had been quietly gloomy about. We spend a lot of breath worrying that electrification and screens and self-driving everything are going to euthanise the love of the proper car. On this evidence, I am not so sure. The EV-ification of the world may not be the extinction event we feared, because the people keeping this flame alive are not nostalgic old-timers running out of road. They are in their thirties, they are obsessed, and they are only getting started. The tradition is not being preserved out here. It is being inherited, by exactly the right people. A green Ferrari Daytona SP3, a white SF90 XX Spider, and a blue McLaren Senna standing on grass at the Royal Bahrain Concours in 2026. Photo: Donovan Figg/F1rst Motors. Why Bahrain, and why now Here is my honest takeaway. For years the assumption was that if you wanted a world-class concours in this region you waited for someone to import one. Bahrain has just proved otherwise. In two editions the Royal Bahrain Concours has gone from promising to genuinely unmissable, and it has done it with real cars, real judges and real heritage, under royal patronage that clearly cares rather than merely lends a name. The Kingdom already owns the region’s Formula One story. On this evidence it intends to own the concours story too. I will be back next November. If you have the slightest interest in great cars, you should be as well.
