Continuing his trek across Europe to revisit the great racing circuits of old, after outings on Nurburgring and Le Mans, Tom Mooney lands at Goodwood in West Sussex.
The fate that signed the death warrant of many of the famous racing circuits in France and Germany of the 1950s – unfit for purpose – as safety standards became an issue due to the high mortality rate of drivers (Ferrari lost five in one season), also befell the track at Goodwood, a two hour train journey south of London.
Then, something miraculously occurred. It rose from the dead.
Unlike two of the more colourful circuits I had difficulty finding recently, Rouen Les Essarts in Northern France, where Jo Schlesser was immolated in front of television cameras, and Bremgarten near Berne in Switzerland, where Achille Varzi was crushed by his Alfa Romeo, Goodwood is alive and kicking.
It had once been in hibernation for 30 years when racing ended in 1966 after a failure to modify the track. Circuit owners were much more stubborn back then. But, twenty years ago, the racing loving Lord March had a vision, and the Goodwood Festival of Speed was born.
This month the Festival of Speed paid homage to Porsche, with seven generations of the 911, now fifty years old, on display, testament to Goodwood’s ancestry as a fast circuit, where the quickest of them all, Stirling Moss, almost came a cropper in a career ending high speed crash in 1963.
Mention of Moss at Goodwood opens a portal to an entire and probably forgotten generation of English racing drivers – Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn _ who took on and beat the best of what Europe had to offer, initially in English bespoke cars improved by the ingenious designers behind the legendary Spitfire and Hurricane.
Once the war was over, and the skies cleared of the Hun, perimeter tracks at RAF airfields were hastily converted into a circux maximus by the owners of the affordable and burgeoning 500 cc cars. The West Hampnett airfield became the Goodwood we know today, and between its first meeting in 1918 and its last in the mid-1960s, the venue played host to drivers who would become household names: Moss won the first ever 500 cc race at Goodwood, while both Collins and Hawthorn. Ferrari works drivers whose lives would be cut short within months of each other, took part in the Goodwood Nine Hours endurance race.
The almost four kilometre track, with seven turns, including St. Mary’s which ended Moss’s career, is a fast circuit shaped like a fried egg, particularly on the Lavant Straight, where Bruce McLaren perished while testing the M8D. He lost control at 100 mph and the car slid until it met with an immovable object.
A version of the M8D was on view at this year’s Festival of Speed, a feat of engineering in itself as over 180,000 paying guests mingled with several hundred cars, their crews and drivers, and where Formula 1 personnel are encouraged to get up close and personal with the public. It works, and this spirit of accessibility is the essence of Goodwood’s charm. With so much machinery at your fingertips, Goodwood is best described as a tactile experience.
The fate which befell Moss and McLaren is a reminder that the circuit can be furiously quick, as is the separate and much older Goodwood hill climb, a rival in 1936 to Brooklands outside London. Last year Sandra Harrison-Moore left the track in her L7-2 Caterham Roadsport 1800 and crashed into a tyre wall, fatally as it turned out, at the Woodcox corner, during a time trial. A decade earlier, John Dawson Damer pushed his Lotus 63 over the limit at the final bend in the hill climb and ploughed through the gantry at 100 mph, killing himself and ending the life of one of the marshals instantly, while another required the partial amputation of his leg. Motor racing is and always will be a blood sport.
And circuits which evolved from former airfields, like Silverstone and Goodwood, have a tendency to bite when you least expect: a Ferrari entering a left hander at a slow speed suddenly careened into a leaning tower of straw bales, yards from where I was standing, before my feet began to rotate. A two second collision, entirely out of the blue, but it closed the circuit for 15 minutes, delaying Eric Clapton’s Ferrari SP 12 EC.
Goodwood is the highest grossing car auction in Europe, with a 1955 Maserati 300S selling for over £2.25 million.
Because of the visual appeal of West Sussex and the grounds of Goodwood estate, you can see how the circuit appeals to the aesthetic sensitivity of the average English racing buff: imaging plonking a three mile racing circuit adjacent to Powerscourt House, and, voila, the Ascott of motor racing is born. Goodwood continues to be the highest grossing car auction in Europe, with a 1955 Maserati 300S selling for over £2.25 million two weeks ago.
Nobody revisits significant moments in racing history better than Goodwood: Moss and Denis Jenkinson reunited in the Mercedes Benz 300 SLR forty years after their triumph in the Mille Miglia; Nick Heidfield returning this year to the scene of his record breaking triumph when he set a blistering pace of 41.6 seconds up the Goodwood hill in his McLaren MP4/13; the appearance of the legendary Silver Arrows on British soil for the first time since before the war.
Goodwood is the hyphen between the past and the present, the one circuit where, year after year, some of the most famous cars in history, the 1952 Jaguar C Type, the 1996 Ford GT MKII, and the recent conqueror of Pikes Peak, the Peugeot 208 T16, are either raced or are on display.
Other cars, fresh from the smithy of a designer’s imagination, make their international debut at Goodwood, like Porsche’s 918 Spyder, a 4.6 litre V8 capable of 875 bhp and 212 mph and, astonishingly, because of its mid-engined hybrid, 85.6 mph.
Because, during his long career, when he went head to head with the genius Fangio so often, and because he was smart enough to know that bravery behind the wheel never trumps precision, Stirling Moss is still with us today, and because this affable octogenarian and Goodwood started out together, it is fitting that, for me, the highlight of this stellar race meeting and its famous circuit was the appearance of Moss in the Mercedes Benz 300 SLR, not the car in which he hammered Ferrari in Italy in 1955, but the sister model driven by Fangio, the 658; forged, not cast, with both eyes on immortality.
