Even the gods of weather know about Goodwood’s place in the
world. The sun was never going to refuse to shine on the 21st Festival of
Speed.
This year it cast a vintage glow on all four days of the
world’s greatest motoring festival, which returned the favour by entertaining
bumper crowds with a magic mixture of dazzling new arrivals, oddballs and
spectacular stalwarts.
Each festival starts by commemorating anniversaries and
setting themes. This year’s highlights included 50 years of the Porsche 911 (the
subject of Gerry Judah’s soaring, three-pronged sculpture at Goodwood House), plus
the centenary of Aston Martin, the 50th anniversary of McLaren Racing, the 50th
anniversary of Jim Clark’s first world championship in 1963, and the event’s
own special anniversary. It is two decades since founder-kingpin Lord March
looked out of his bedroom window to estimate crowd numbers at the first
festival — held for a bunch of friends who owned nice cars and bikes —
expecting 2500 people, only to be greeted by 25,000 instead.
As it has done for the past three years, the festival began
on Thursday with the Moving Motor Show, a ‘selling’ event for car makers that
makes it possible for invited customers to test production cars on a route
around the estate. This Thursday event struggled in its early days, but those
with commercial interests this year praised its effectiveness. The outbreak of
enterprise also brought an unprecedented number of Taj Mahal-style mobile
showrooms, topped by a temporary Ford structure so high that from its top you
could see over Goodwood House to the verdant countryside beyond. No UK motor
show? It’s just not true.
Goodwood understands car retailing, and the crowds expect
and support it. FoS-TECH showcases hillclimb runs of green prototypes you’d
only see on plinths elsewhere, while the First Glance class features mainstream
models that are interesting but hardly supercars. Two eye-grabbers in these
groups were Alfa Romeo’s pretty, promising
4C and Volkswagen’s
petite XL1 diesel-electric ‘efficiency car’, which made several brisk
runs on battery power alone.
The number of rare cars and one-offs was amazing. Headline grabbers
included the stunning Peugeot
208 T16 Pikes Peak racer, in which Sébastien Loeb recently sliced
92sec off the record time for the famous American hillclimb. Bentley showed the
potential of its Continental GT3 car (it seems to go even better than it looks)
and Audi had its Le Mans winner, still covered in rubber, dust and bugs from La
Sarthe.
These days, most of the hill runs are demos. They stopped
timing F1 cars several years ago after Nick Heidfeld stopped the clocks at a
hairy 41.6sec, but Justin Law showed fast driving was still in vogue with a
time of 45.95sec for the 1.16-mile course in his family’s Silk Cut Jaguar XJR8/9,
a late ’80s Le Mans car. Close behind were Gregory Guilvert in Loeb’s T16 (he
managed 45.86, but what would Seb himself have done?) and Jonny Cocker, who
scored a laudable 47.34sec in the battery-powered Drayson Racing Lola, which
only two weeks ago set a world land speed record for electric cars.
Talking LSRs, the estate’s famous cricket pitch, on which
the laws of the game were written, became home to the greatest-ever gathering
of land speed cars. Highlights ranged from Fiat’s 21.7-litre aero-engined
‘Mephistopheles’, the last car to set a record on the public road, through
Henry Segrave’s Golden Arrow, which beat pretenders with twice the power using
light weight and good aerodynamics, to Brooklands’ beautiful Napier-Railton
Special and the turbine-powered, wheel-driven Bluebird that Donald Campbell
took to a record in the Australian desert. Also on hand was Bloodhound
SSC, Britain’s latest land speed contender, which aims to crack 1000mph in
South Africa next year.
Goodwood is justly famous for its rich alternatives to the
central track events, such as stunt bikers, rally rides, 4x4 experiences,
concours and air displays, but the way people drifted back to the grandstands
for two special hill displays — Formula 1 cars, for which seven teams and a
bevy of famous drivers turned up, and road-going supercars — showed how
important the hill runs are to this most car-literate of crowds. The only displays
that topped them were three deafening aerial events: the Red Arrows on Friday,
Vulcan on Saturday and the Eurofighter on Sunday.
The Supercar Paddock was packed 10 deep, with crowds
seemingly more hell-bent than ever on getting close to this year’s 50-strong
selection of the world’s fastest cars. You might think that in times like
these, new candidates for the rarified end of the car market might be in short
supply, but no chance. McLaren captured the early limelight by showing how fast
the P1 could
go (in the hands of Button and Perez) and supported it with the new GT Sprint,
a 12C “developed and optimised exclusively for the track”.
The £60k Mexican-built
Vühl gave proceedings a modern look, while in the new Wraith coupé
Rolls-Royce seemed delighted to have a car whose performance justified
inclusion in such company. Aston Martin ran the CC100 concept it unveiled five
weeks ago at the Nürburgring, and ‘Jaguarness’ guru Mike Cross demonstrated
both the Project 7 concept and his own unearthly skills at car control.
Yet it was two old Merc single-seaters — and their most
famous driver — that made the biggest headlines. First off, in the Bonhams
auction, the world’s only privately owned Mercedes W196,
driven by Fangio in 1954, changed hands to an unknown buyer over the phone for
£19.6 million, despite being “extensively patinated” and in need of a rebuild.
Then Mercedes’ own W196 was driven on all three days by Hans Herrmann, Jackie
Stewart and Nico Rosberg, with star appearances by Stirling Moss, who used one
of these to win his first grand prix at Aintree.
Moss is an old man now, but no less a hero than he was
50-odd years ago when the papers were running daily medical updates following
the accident that ended his career. It was truly heart-warming that every time
he raised his arm from the W196 in languid salute to the crowd, five thousand
arms waved back. This, everyone knew, is what Goodwood is about.
source: http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/goodwood-festival-speed/goodwood-festival-speed-2013-retrospective-galleryby Steve Cropley
http://www.fzrestoration.com
No comments:
Post a Comment