So what exactly does it feel like to fling million-dollar cars around?
The Goodwood Festival of Speed, owners and enthusiasts of prime machinery tell Clayton Seams, is heaven on earth.
The Goodwood Festival of Speed is so fantastic, it doesn’t seem real. There are no velvet ropes and no VIP paddock tickets needed. Do you have a gate admission? Then you can wander up to the priceless Ferrari 250 GTOs and take in their beauty without museum barriers or a two-foot-long zoom lens. Amazing.
The annual festival, held on the grand Goodwood grounds outside Chichester, England, is the only place where you’ll see Pebble Beach-calibre cars racing in anger. Many people cower at the thought of driving a multimillion-dollar car at speed, and many collectors keep their race-bred “investments” tucked away in climate-controlled garages.
Julian Majnub is not one of those collectors. His father bought a tattered 1935 Bugatti Type 35 finished in French Racing Blue nearly 40 years ago for a not-insubstantial amount of money for the time. A full 20 years ago, Julian took over stewardship of the car and he’s been racing it ever since.
The Bugatti Type 35 was a factory-built race car. Designed to take on the world’s top racing events, it dominated the world stage and remains one of the most sought after prewar classics in the world. When asked if Majnub ever thinks about the car’s value as he flings it into turns, he replies simply, “No, not at all.” He justifies this by saying that you can’t really total a milliondollar car.
“Cars are made out of components and all the components are fixable and salvageable,” Majnub says.
Peter Blakeney Edwards, who pilots a 1935 Frazer Nash race car, has a similar outlook.
“The minute (value) enters your head, then you become more dangerous as a driver,” Edwards says. “Because you’re not focusing on the job, part of your focus is worrying about the value of the car and worrying about damaging it.”
He says he has routinely raced cars worth “millions of pounds” and that the job of racing a car can’t be clouded by the value of the car itself.
It might seem crazy to some that you would take a nearly priceless car and thrash it on a race course, but Ralph Wagenknecht, a spokesman with Mercedes-Benz Classic, explains why doing so is important.
“Even if the cars have a very high value, its important for us to show that all these cars are still able to run, show their performance and genius engineering that was pushing the company for more than 125 years,” he says.
Mercedes-Benz brought no fewer than 10 classic cars to Goodwood, ranging from a 1903 Simplex to a Group C Le Mans racer. The cars show a cross-section of racing, from the beginning of the 20th century to the newest supercars of today.
For whatever the reason they choose, the brave and often wellheeled drivers of Goodwood make it the greatest place on earth for any car enthusiast.