Cheltenham Festival Chauffeur Hire, Gloucestershire

Every March, Prestbury Park is given over to the Festival for four days, building from that roar which greets the opening day's first race through to the Gold Cup at the week's end. Racing itself starts in the early afternoon and runs on into the late afternoon. For most people, though, the day begins a good deal earlier and carries on in the town long after the last horse has walked back in. On the edge of the Cotswolds, March is cold, often wet, frequently muddy.

Traffic is not something Cheltenham handles well. Approach roads fill from late morning, racecourse car parks shut once they hit capacity, and in the hour after racing ends the town centre becomes very slow indeed. All of that a chauffeur removes: you are dropped close to your entrance, then collected from a road your driver has picked rather than the one everybody else is queueing on.

A good many clients base themselves out in the Cotswolds, around Broadway, Stow, Painswick and the villages close by, then travel in each day. On Festival mornings that run takes anything from half an hour to well over an hour, depending on route and weather, so we leave earlier than the map would have you believe. Tickets, enclosure badges and hospitality all come through the racecourse or your host; being an independent chauffeur service, we supply none of them.

March conditions make a Range Rover Autobiography the most useful vehicle of the week. It sits high enough for verges and field entrances, stays warm, and thinks nothing of a wet lane. Six travelling together do best in a V-Class, which swallows coats, boots and racing kit. A couple staying at a country house hotel will find the evening return genuinely restful in an S-Class.