The Goodwood Festival of Speed gets bigger, better and more popular each year. Last month, Andrew Balfour experienced it first hand and it didn’t disappoint!
All photos © GPDestinations.com
Our original plan had been to go on Saturday, but tickets were already sold out by the time we started booking the trip. So Friday it was. Tickets were £50 each and we elected to collect them at the event rather than go through the hassle of getting them sent out. Our day started in Paris. We took the early Eurostar train to Kings Cross, then transferred to Victoria Station. Not pre-booking our train to Chichester meant we paid top dollar, around £35 for return tickets. We also had no choice but to leave our suitcases at the train station for the day.
All things considered, we did pretty well to arrive at Goodwood by midday. The train took around 90 minutes from Victora and there was a shuttle bus from Chichester to the estate, but we ended up splitting a cab with some fellow Aussies. The weather was beautiful on arrival, but no less than 30 minutes later the fickle English summer had taken a turn for the worse and dark clouds began approaching. It didn’t rain, but without the sun it was noticeable cooler.
We grabbed some food and a drink at the cricket pitch, then began exploring the grounds. We checked out the start line and the car manufacturers displays, the main house and then the F1 pits. The sheer number of old F1 cars on display from different eras was impressive, and most of them also took on the hillclimb over the weekend. With only one afternoon at the festival, we were never going to see all the F1 categories in action, and that was the big disappointment of the day.
We pushed on to explore the further stretches of the hillclimb and watched everything from the ‘Beast of Turin’ (the 28.5-litre engined Fiat S76 from 1911) to the 2015 Le Mans-winning Porsche hybrid, and plenty in between! Our highlights were the F1s, of course, Damon Hill in a Lotus and classic late 80s and early 90s McLaren and Williams cars (see below). Although it was an expensive day out, we really enjoyed our first experience at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. We only scratched the surface of what’s on offer and look forward to returning for the whole weekend in the near future.
