Well after spending time at Goodwood on Thursday I couldn’t imagine how much better it could get on Sunday. It took us almost 5 hours to get down due to a diversion off the M1, leaving at 5.30am from Leicester meant we arrived around 10.30am. Moving slowly in the queue outside was excruciating, as we could hear various engines at full chat going up the hill, or going round the rally circuit but couldn’t see them as we were stuck outside. This was very annoying as we were arriving just in time for the 70s – 80s F1, Prototypes, Group C and Modern Endurance cars while we were stuck in the queue into the car park, we couldn’t bear to miss these going up the hill. So as soon as we got out of the car we ran towards the hill climb.
We found some of the endurance racers going up the hill as we arrived, with some amazing engine sounds lingering in the air. Remember to watch these videos in HD, as they will most likely have better sound quality too in HD!
After this batch we headed straight to the F1 paddock where all the action was, cars heading both in and out of the paddocks to go up the hill. This was an amazing experience to see these cars in motion with their open engines being revved and used as they should be. In the paddocks we found a lot of the cars you would dream of as a child.
Such as this Mercedes CLK GTR which I had only seen in my childhood in video games, having played the early Need for Speed games, it was definitely a car I wanted to get close to.
We then headed towards the centre piece where all the Lotus F1 cars had gathered, which was an amazing opportunity for some cool pictures…
Each generation of F1 cars showed so much character and individuality in both their appearance and engineering.
We were lucky enough to catch all these amazing machines leaving the centre piece, and return to the paddocks. Here’s a quick clip I got…
A quick stop at the style et lux area again and the Alain Prost Exhibition which wasn’t open on Thursday while we were on that side of the strip.
We then slowly headed up the hill while stopping and observing some of the action at various points, to make our way up to the rally stage. As if there hadn’t already been enough to see! We also got to see where the hill climb ends and where all the cars were parking up. I’ll leave this for another post, so keep tuned for more Goodwood Festival of Speed coverage!
I still have plenty of pictures to show and videos too which still need uploading, so will stick another post up to try to immerse you in the amazing atmosphere of Goodwood.