The Goodwood School for Real Racers

When I was a kid I followed motorsport in a big way, watching Formula One on TV, visiting the British Grand Prix and the International Trophy when they were at Silverstone and the British round of the European Formula 2 Championship at Thruxton (which was just down the road from where I grew up in Berkshire).

I used to read Pete Lyons’ Grand Prix reports in the weekly mag Autosport, also lapping up page-after-page of reports about sportscars, touring cars, rallying and club racing. On top of that I also bought Motor Sport, the monthly magazine ‘which gave its name to the sport’. Its obsession with pre-war racing was a bit too much for me, but Denis Jenkinson’s Grand Prix reports were brilliant for the way they punctured some of the commercial egos who stalked the sport (he referred to the Players-sponsored Team Lotus as Team Shambles)

These days, the idea of shelling out £150-200 to sit a quarter of a mile from the track ‘watching’ a Grand Prix is the wrong side of silly street for me. I still watch it occasionally on TV, but long for the days when the sport looked and felt like racing rather than a corporate brand strategy developed in a wind tunnel.

Which is what took me down to Goodwood in West Sussex at the weekend. This is the time of year when Lord March stages the second of his increasingly successful representations of motor sport the way it was. July sees the Festival of Speed, where drivers past and present fling all sorts of metal (and carbon fibre) up a hillclimb outside Goodwood House. And September sees the Goodwood Revival.

It’s called Revival for two reasons. One is that it brings back into use a legendary racing circuit which waved goodbye to racing in the late 1960s when Freddie March (the current Lord March’s dad) decided he could no longer carry on ploughing money into modernising the track. The other is that the event is a celebration not just of motor sport in decades past but of life in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

So it mixes road and track cars and bikes from those decades with Second World War aircraft, displays of motoring memorabilia (presented as they used to be), and invites the crowd to enter into the spirit of things by dressing in period costume (which thousands did, some to impeccable lengths).

Best of all, it brings these priceless motoring icons within touching distance of the paying public. You can walk within inches of classic sports racing cars worth millions (I made a bee-line for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s Ferrari 250 GTO) and rub shoulders with drivers and riders (Sir Stirling Moss was busy signing autographs). Unlike F1 drivers doing their corporate duty (something Lewis Hamilton is honest enough to admit he loathes), they turn out because they love it.

And ‘it’ in this case is Racing. The rare metal they drive may be worth fortunes, but they hammered round the track as if they were chasing a championship-deciding win – sometimes with eye-wateringly expensive consequences.

For my money the most impressive spectacle came at the start of the Whitsun Trophy, a race for mid 1960s Le Mans-style sportscars. Standing at Madgwick, the circuit’s first corner, we saw a 30-strong field take off like the Charge of the Light Brigade and hurl itself at the bend.

Leading the field were two Lola T70s, cars which hid F1-style chassis technology under a sports car body driven by massively powerful Chevrolet V8 engines. These monsters attacked the same piece of track with a commitment which meant only one was going to get round it. Sure enough, one went spinning across the tarmac, with other Lolas, Ford GT40s and Ferraris scattering in all directions.

The one thing which gave me hope that Formula One hasn’t completely lost touch with what it is meant to be was the fact that one of the scattering cars was being piloted by Adrian Newey, the designer whose genius has left Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel untouchable.

He thrashed round in an impressive manner, lunging up the field in a beautiful 1965 GT40 which he keeps for those weekends when he’s not busy out-thinking everyone else in motor sport.

But F1 would have to gulp down a pack of simplification pills if it was to get anywhere near the spectacle we saw at Goodwood. We were closer to the action, the cars weren’t glued to the tarmac in the way today’s winged wonders are, and the drivers were out for some serious fun.

They – and the Goodwood Revival - are what motor sport should really be about: Racers.