AT LUNCH WITH...
The brains behind Goodwood’s Festival of Speed and Revival takes a break from estate business to discuss more important matters – motorcycles
The Duke of Richmond, the man behind the Fest of Speed, talks bikes
When the Earl of March (now the Duke of Richmond) came up with the idea of the Festival of Speed, it would have been easy to leave motorcycles out of the equation. Cars are a far bigger market, after all, and the event would no doubt have been successful without a load of classic bikes knocking about. But he insisted on them being involved.
“It was very clear to me from the beginning that all our events should be for bikes and cars,” says the Duke, as we await our starters in the Farmer Butcher Chef restaurant on his 12,000-acre Goodwood estate. “But mixing cars and bikes just doesn’t seem to happen. I don’t think there’s any other race meeting with both. Bikes are such wonderful things – why wouldn’t you want them there?”
It was his grandfather, the mercurial Freddie March, who triggered this love of motorcycles, with the young Duke intoxicated by Freddie’s extraordinary collection of machinery. “The first memory I have of a motorcycle is seeing a picture of my grandfather with all his cars, aeroplanes and bikes parked in front of the house. And in the middle is an R5 BMW, which I now own thanks to John Surtees – a crazy story.
“John rang me one day and said: ‘I think your grandfather’s bike is coming up for sale – you’d better check it’s the right one.’ I made some enquiries and my grandfather’s name was in the log book, which was amazing. He bought it new from Jock West [the UK’S first BMW motorcycle dealer, who also came second to Georg Meier in the 1939 Senior TT on a BMW Type 255 Kompressor]. I actually met Jock when he was in his late 90s at the TT riders’ lunch – he was an amazing old boy and he remembered selling the bike to my grandfather.
“I told John I definitely wanted the R5, so he agreed not to bid on it. Anyway, in those days the children were little and we used to take them for a holiday to Jersey after the Festival, so away we went. John rang me a few days later and said: ‘You didn’t bid for the bike’. I had completely forgotten all about it.
“He said: ‘Don’t worry, I bought it for you’. Bonhams were selling it and they knew I was keen, but they couldn’t get hold of me. So they rang Surtees, but he was riding at Montlhéry and they couldn’t get hold of him either. Eventually he had a free moment and walked into his hotel room to find the phone off the hook. He picked it up and a voice said: ‘Hello, it’s Bonhams here. Do you want to buy this bike? It’s in three lots’ time.’ It was all very weird – like fate.
‘ON A BIKE YOU’RE IN YOUR OWN WORLD. IT’S INTENSE AND YOU NEED TO BE ON THE BALL. YOU’RE IN THE MOMENT’
“So I have the R5 in the photograph, and I’m amazed how good it is – it feels surprisingly modern to ride and is a gorgeous thing. My grandfather used to talk to me about his other bikes, too – he had ABCS, and there are lots of pictures of him on huge motorcycles. He was very interested in modern engineering, although when I was young he wasn’t really riding bikes any more because he’d had a bad accident in a Jensen.”
The Duke didn’t ride bikes then, either – his parents forbade it. “They rather foolishly let me have a Morgan three-wheeler when I was 16 instead – and, of course, it was far more dangerous than a bike. It was lethal. You used to be going along and there’d be a terrible scraping noise because the back wheel had fallen off.”
Not for the first time, I’m struck by the Duke’s gilded existence – the stately homes, aeroplanes and Morgans on 16th birthdays seem a world away from real life. But it’s difficult to resent any of it, because the Duke is such an affable bloke, with none of the entitlement people seem to acquire while living at the top of the financial tree. Plus it helps that he’s transparently nuts about motorcycles and the people who race them.
It dawns on me how he manages to persuade hundreds of collectors and racers to take part in his events – they do it because they like him. He’s an enthusiast who just so happens to have a race track in his garden (and a horse racing course, an aerodrome, a four-star hotel, a couple of restaurants, two cafés, two golf courses, a 4000-acre organic farm, a cricket pitch and a Rolls-royce factory).
But, unlike other successful businessmen I’ve interviewed, he’s not bothered about discussing business or the issues involved in managing his staff – all 550 of them. He seems much happier talking bikes: “When I lived in London I used to ride a lot, because I had to be down here [in Goodwood] a lot, so I used to zoom down on my K1 [the all-enclosed late-’80s BMW]. I love my BMWS and loved the design of it, but it was awful really – it was so heavy. If you went round a corner too slowly, it would just fall over. I’m not
sure the design has stood the test of time too well, either.
“I bought a Bimota DB1 RS in 1988 or ’89, purely because I loved the look of it. It’s a jewel of a motorcycle with so many nice touches – those Marvic wheels, for example – but I’m not as supple as I used to be and you really need to be tiny to fit on it. Riding that down from London was hectic because they’re not easy to control. But one of the big differences between bikes and cars is it makes more sense to me to go for a ride, as a pure moment of pleasure, compared to going for a drive. On a bike you’re in your own world, and it’s very intense and you need to be on the ball. You’re in the moment.”
I’d read that he also owns a Ducati 888 SP4, but the Duke explains he didn’t buy that one. “I had an 851 before that, but I fell off on a roundabout and smashed it up and got rid of it. Then, one birthday, my wife gave me this beautiful silver cup which was given to the third Duke by George III when he got married. It was a lovely piece of family history and I was thinking: ‘This is very nice, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for’. Then she made me look inside it, and there was an invoice – she’d bought me a new 888. And that was the first machine up the hill [at the first Festival of Speed] – with me riding it.”
That first Festival of Speed was a swirling maelstrom of elation and despair for the Duke. “I wanted to have some patrons and I asked Stirling [Moss] for the cars, and John [Surtees] for the bikes. John actually organised the whole motorcycle side of things – he got the bikes and the riders. We thought we might get 2000 spectators and 25,000 turned up, which was a fantastic shock.” There’s a pause and the Duke studies his plate. “But Chas Guy died on his Vincent, which was dreadful [Chas crashed after the finish line after suffering a tank slapper]. I just thought that was the end of the whole thing.
“It was the first morning of the first event and I was on my Ducati at the top of the hill. The clerk of the course turned up in his car, told me to get in and said there had been a terrible accident. I couldn’t believe that I’d started this thing and someone had died. It was the last thing I was expecting to happen. I thought: ‘What a terrible idea this is. It’s over’.
“But Dennis Carter [then head of the British Automobile Club and a key advisor to the Duke], said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is motorsport and we have to carry on – we have to manage it and deal with it.’ It was bloody awful.”
Though nearly 30 years ago, the death of Chas Guy still clearly haunts the Duke and I wonder if he worries about the bike races at the Revival, which are ferociously competitive, despite the light-hearted paddock atmosphere. “Yes, I do worry, but it’s a good track for bikes because you can slide off and won’t hit anything. And the quality of the riders is astonishing – more than the cars. They are really trying, though – even in the wet, when the riding has been amazing. I remember Max Biaggi [four-time world 250 GP champion] kind of assuming he’d just jump on and win, and being quite surprised when he ended up finishing fifth.
“If you look at the number of bikes compared to the cars, I think bikes play a disproportionately important role in both events. Partly that’s because I just love having the bikes there, and at the Festival of Speed there’s also that mad batch with all the current F1 cars and all the bikes.
“If you want an absolute adrenalin rush – the most intense emotion you’ll ever have – you need to stand at the exit of the assembly area as that batch goes past. It’s crazy. The noise is unbelievable. How we were ever able to get them to go down together is amazing. It’s happened from year one, and no one thought about it particularly – it wasn’t a plan, it just ended up like that because of the timetable.”
Another unintended consequence of the Festival of Speed (and Revival) has been the raft of new pals the Duke made among racing royalty. Chief among them was Barry Sheene: “I didn’t know Barry before, but we became great friends. Of course he had his last ever ride at Goodwood [in 2002], which was very emotional. He was so great with everyone – I can remember this middle-aged woman shouting ‘Barry! Barry! Barry!’ [Duke doing a surprisingly effective cockney accent] at him as he was walking through the paddock once, and she came up and threw her arms around him. She said: ‘I’ve loved you since you were 19,’ and he was so nice with her. He was so impressive like that – he made time for everybody. I miss him a lot.
“And to have people like Schwantz and Valentino at the Festival of Speed was amazing. They took quite a lot of getting – they’re not easy. Valentino was one of my all-time highlights at the Festival of Speed. He only came because the Assen GP was on the Saturday – it was the last year before it moved to Sunday.
The Duke managed to get Valentino Rossi to visit the Festival of Speed in 2015. Naturally, the Duke asked Rossi to ride his GP bike into Goodwood House
‘VALENTINO WAS ONE OF MY ALL-TIME HIGHLIGHTS AT THE FESTIVAL OF SPEED. HE ONLY CAME BECAUSE THE ASSEN GP WAS ON THE SATURDAY’
“We sent a plane over on Saturday afternoon and brought him back. He arrived in the middle of our big Festival of Speed dinner, so I came out to meet him. He’d won at Assen, so he was in a really good mood. He had shorts and a T-shirt on, and I said you don’t need to change – it doesn’t matter because you’re Valentino Rossi. But he insisted he got changed into his black tie and was absolutely brilliant the whole weekend – he was so upbeat. ‘I love-a being here,’ he kept saying [the Duke doing a passable Italian accent]. We got a great picture of him riding his Motogp race bike into the house.”
Then there’s John Surtees, who the Duke worked closely with from the beginning. “He was extraordinary. John didn’t just turn up [at the Festival], he was really involved – we had some right tussles about bikes he wanted in that we weren’t so sure about. I can’t remember the details, but he loved his MVS and BMWS... he was so generous with his time and he never asked for anything in return. What a man. Did you know that, after winning all those bike championships, the first time he ever saw a car race, he was in it? And he came second. And it was here at Goodwood.”
The Duke also got the chance to quiz the racing greats about their riding technique, though he admits he didn’t always get much useful information. “I had a great chat with Wayne Gardner [the notoriously tough Aussie who won the 1987 500cc World Championship and plenty of Revival races] and I asked him what he was doing physically to get bikes to go so fast.
“He said that no one’s ever taught him anything – his uncle gave him a bike when he was 13 and he just rode it and raced it and won. So I asked what he did as he leant into a corner? He said: ‘I don’t know, mate – I just do it’.”
Part of the reason for the success of the Festival and Revival is the global publicity that surrounds them. Whether it’s Dougie Lampkin riding over the roof of Goodwood House, or the entire motorcycle grid riding through the dining room (shrouding the priceless Stubbs paintings on the walls in two-stroke fumes), the 65-year-old Duke has a talent for concocting Youtube-friendly stunts. “Riding the bikes through the house was my idea. We were trying to think what to do, because we’d done some crazy things before. One year we had 70 people in the ballroom for dinner, all at one table. So we made all the stuff in the middle of the table out of sugar – all the fruit bowls, jugs and what have you. It all looked real, though. Then, at the end of dinner, there was this roar of an engine and Dougie appears through the door, jumps the bike onto the table and rides straight down the table, smashing everything. I’m always thinking about what we can do to make things more interesting.”
So do other people with stately homes regard you as a maverick lunatic for allowing people to do these things, I wonder? “Probably, yes. But it’s fun to do this stuff.”
‘AT THE END OF DINNER THERE WAS THIS ROAR OF AN ENGINE AND DOUGIE JUMPS THE BIKE ONTO THE DINING TABLE’