Goodwoodis like a dream vacation: you look forward to it for weeks, enjoy it to the full and then fall into melancholy when it's over. Before returning to everyday life, the first thoughts turn to the next vacation.
For visitors, the Goodwood Revival Meeting is a vacation trip into the past. A leap back in time to the Middle Ages of motor racing, when the rock'n'roll wave swept Europe, ladies dressed to the nines even for a trip to the racecourse and gentlemen's eyes wandered between décolleté and defilé.
At Goodwood, nothing is as it usually is in Historic Racing. The circuit still runs like it did in the Golden Sixties and sends shivers down the spine of every greenhorn at the wheel at the speeds and dangers. The surroundings with their historic-looking buildings, the ambiance and the atmosphere in the paddock reflect the spirit of the times when Stirling Moss was still battling Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark. Moss and Stewart are still there, turning the wheel of some car or other every year, and Clark would be delighted to see how the racing cars of his fatal era are still driven to their heart's content today.
Lap record
The fact that the official lap record at the Goodwood Circuit, which Clark and Stewart had jointly held since April 19, 1965, was improved from 1'20.4 to 1'18.954 only this year by Briton Andrew Smith in a Lola-Chevy T70 Spyder from the legendary CanAm era speaks for both the past and the present. His time corresponds to an average speed of 176.11 km/h! In general, every single one of the 16 races was amazing, with or without lap records.
Want some examples? Tom Kristensen, an eight-time Le Mans winner himself and long-time DTM winning driver, had to stretch himself to win the touring car race from the 1950s with an Austin A95 Westminster against a horde of Austin A40s, Jaguar Mk1s and VIIs and a fast Volvo Amazon 122. He was subsequently awarded the Will Hoy Memorial Trophy for the "greatest drive" in a car with a closed cockpit.
"I drove here against cars whose names I'd never heard before. It was great fun," beamed the Dane under the winner's crown. And so were we, Tom, as we watched the battle of the front-engined GP cars with experts like Frank Stippler (Maserati 250F), Barrie Williams (Ferguson Project 99 with 4WD), Richard "Dick" Attwood (Ferrari 246 Dino) and Gary Pearson (BRM Type 25) at the wheel.
BRM anniversary
This race under the name Richmond Trophy ended with a happy ending, as Pearson won on the 60th anniversary of the British racing brand of all things. To mark the occasion, there was a fantastic parade of BRM models, the like of which had never been seen in action before. To top it all off, Attwood beat the entire Lotus Climax pack in the post-1961 Formula 1 field with the BRM P261.
Goodwood paid special tribute as a Racing Hero this year, as it does every year, to Britain's John Surtees, the only world champion on two and four wheels. "I contested my first car race here and immediately took pole position against people like Clark," murmured Surtees, whose son Henri was hit by a wheel in Formula 2 in 2009. Moments of true joy, like at Goodwood among old friends, have become rare for him.
