Good Lord!

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is arguably the most spectacular, action-packed auto-fest on the planet. Motoring.com.au gets one of the best seats in the house, riding shotgun with Jaguar chassis guru Mike Cross in the brutal XKR-S
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I’m starting to get mildly alarmed. The entire body language and demeanour of Mike Cross has visibly changed. His breathing has quickened, his eyes are staring intently ahead and I can sense the tension in his arms and hands.

Just minutes earlier we had been standing in the supercar paddock and he had casually been speaking of his love for superbikes and describing what goes into a typical working day as “Jaguar chief engineer, vehicle integrity” – his official job title.

But now, poised on the start line for the 1.87km dash up the driveway of Lord March’s estate – which constitutes the signature hillclimb event for the annual petrolhead’s bonanza known as the Goodwood Festival of Speed – a whole new persona has emerged. Perched in the passenger seat of the 405kW French Racing Blue Jaguar XKR-S, I glance across to see Cross is wearing what’s commonly referred to as the ‘race face’.  I begin to wonder if this is the same soft-spoken fatherly figure I had been conversing with in the paddock just five minutes earlier.

We’re given the ‘go’ signal by the marshal and Cross buries the throttle. The rear tyres erupt in a cloud of white smoke and we rocket off the line in a furry of V8 thunder and violence. I’m still catching my breath as we drift through the first corner, completely broadside with tyres still smoking, and all I can think to do is flash a cheeky grin at my motoring hack colleagues, who are enviously looking on from the corporate grandstand.

Cross continues to entertain the galleries – the three-day event attracts 150,000 spectators – with more impossibly long drifts through the next two corners before the course abruptly tightens up. Open grassy verges suddenly make way for stone walls and hay bales tightly hemming in the track, which means there’s now absolutely zero margin for error. Make a mistake here – even a small one – and your vehicle is going to make the trip back to the paddock on the back of a truck. Undeterred, Cross keeps up the pace, but reins in the sideways antics. As we blast over the finish line, the relaxed, fatherly figure again makes a return and Cross asks me if the one hour spent standing around in the paddock had been worth it for the one-minute blast up the hill. “Hell, yeah!” I reply.

Wandering back to the grandstand, it takes me a while to mentally digest what I’ve just experienced. Very few are lucky enough to experience this hillclimb from within the confines of the cockpit, but the Goodwood Festival of Speed – referred to as “the largest garden motoring party in the world” – offers enough entertainment, even as an ordinary spectator.

Held within the immaculate grounds of Goodwood House (near the south coast of the UK), the annual hill-climb event is a revhead’s nirvana that features a more diverse collection of collectible cars, motorbikes and star drivers than you’ll find in any other place at the same time. From current and historic Formula 1 racers and 400km/h supercars to steam-powered carriages of the 19th century, it’s pure automotive porn. Throw in a few 3000bhp top fuel dragsters and an array of classic rally cars, and you’ve got a genuine sensory overload of sound, smell and colour.

The featured marque this year is Jaguar – to celebrate 50 years of the E-type – and to ram home the milestone there’s a giant sculpture of the iconic coupé, made entirely from pipes, perched on its nose on the lush lawns in front of Goodwood House.

The theme for the 2011 Goodwood FoS is ‘Racing Revolutions – Quantum leaps that shaped motor sport’, and, to put it another way, it’s a celebration of the engineering ingenuity that has seen designers constantly pushing technical boundaries in search of ‘the unfair advantage’.

This year marks 75 years since Auto Union won the European Championship with a ground-breaking rear-engined car; 30 years since the Audi Quattro heralded rallying’s four-wheel-drive age and the McLaren MP4/1 introduced the carbonfibre chassis to F1; and 20 years since a rotary-engined Mazda took the chequered flag at Le Mans.

All of these cars are in attendance, along with other landmark designs, from a four- wheel-drive Bugatti Type 53 to a gas turbine Lotus 56; a transverse gearbox Ferrari 312T to the Audi R10 TDi Le Mans racer. Also milling around are many of the designers and drivers who took these innovations from drawing board to chequered flag.

The event’s origins can be traced back to the summer of 1936, when the Earl of March and ninth Duke of Richmond – better known as the talented designer, engineer, racing driver and Brooklands winner Freddie March – held a private hillclimb for the Lancia Car Club at Goodwood House. He won it, naturally, and in doing so inspired his grandson, the present Earl of March, to create a new racing event at his family home. 

The resulting event was the Festival of  Speed, and the inaugural edition was held in the summer of 1993, attracting 25,000 spectators. Today, the Festival of Speed has become firmly entrenched as the must-attend annual celebration of motoring culture. Attendance is now capped at 150,000, with admission strictly by advance ticket only.

Although the hillclimb is the primary focus, there are plenty of other attractions, including a challenging loose-surface Forest Rally Stage, the Cartier ‘Style et Luxe’ concours d’elegance, world debuts of new car models (including the latest BMW M5 that makes its official world debut at this month’s Frankfurt motor show) and the FoS-TECH technology pavilion with its advanced automotive technology displays.

The Festival of Speed is also the only event outside of the Formula 1 circus to attract significant attendance from the current F1 teams and drivers. Among the F1 crop at this year’s event are Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton – the former taking the opportunity to thrash the McLaren MP4-12C GT3 racer up the hill, while Hamilton does a couple of demo runs in the F1 car.

Incidentally, the record time for the hillclimb was set in 1999 when Nick Heidfeld drove a McLaren MP4/13 Formula One racer up the hill in 41.6 seconds (161.519km/h), but for safety reasons F1 cars are no longer allowed to do official timed runs, so these days the focus is on the spectacular rather than speed.

However, there’s still a keen tussle for fastest time among the rest of the runners, and the quickest man up the hill in this year’s event is former British rally champ Jonny Milner, who blasts up the 1.87km course in 48.06 seconds in his feral turbocharged, nitrous oxide-boosted Toyota Celica. It’s a remarkable feat, and his commitment is evident as he uses every millimeter of the track, and even parts of the grass verge, to shave every last tenth of a second off his time.

The on-track action is intense and unrelenting, no less so on the Forest Rally Stage, but there’s plenty of peripheral distractions elsewhere, including an aerial exhibition of precision flying by the Red Arrows and a marginally less high-flying freestyle motocross jumping display on the cricket pitch.

Then there’s Cartier ‘Style et Luxe’ concours d’elegance, set on the tranquil lawn of Goodwood House, far from the throng of racing engines. The ‘Style et Luxe’ is contested by about 50 cars in 10 classes representing the history of motoring, and where it differs from the typical concours is that judges are not car experts but eminent personalities from the arts. What’s more, judging is not a scientific points-scoring process, but a consideration of each car as “an object of beauty and practicality”. There’s no doubt it’s a great exhibition of eye candy for any car lover.

After two days of trudging around the estate and ogling cars and nubile promo girls until my eyeballs are bulging out of their sockets, it’s time to head home. I’m knackered, and satiated. Just as well the schlep back to London is in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar XJ. After all the energy spent leering at cars, the last thing I want to do is drive one.

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