‘I don’t do a bloody thing!’
COFFEE WITH GOODWOOD’S DUKE
You’ve probably been to this guy’s house. Over the past 25 years, four million tickets have been sold for the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Allowing for those who come every year, at least half a million people, including most of
CAR’s readership, have wandered through the parkland around Goodwood House, home of the Duke of Richmond.
If that’s your only experience of this place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a permanent motorsport theme park, so vast and varied are its structures and entertainments. For the three weeks it takes to construct, the Festival is the world’s largest greenfield construction site, and once completed it draws enough electricity to power nearby Chichester. The house itself is dwarfed by it all, flanked by colossal video screens and towered over by one of Gerry Judah’s 100-tonne, 150foot, am-I-actually-seeing-that automotive aerial sculptures.
But visit at any other time and there’s weirdly little evidence that the Festival happens at all. I’ve come to have coffee with the Duke on a glorious February day, using his drive for what it was actually intended for, which is to get to the House past sheep quietly grazing, rather than tearing up in a modern F1 car or an aero-engined Edwardian racer.
I park on the gravel carriage circle behind the Duke’s Land Rover V8 Defender and his Porsche 911 GT2 RS. They’ve been left there for us to drive later: his cars are usually kept well out of sight. Before I go in I wander across the lawn to see if I can spot where that colossal sculpture is anchored each year. I find it: a tiny hatch maybe 70cm square and carefully turfed over. It’s the only visual reassurance that the Festival isn’t just the fevered dream of millions of motorsport fans.
The front door is opened by the steward (you don’t need to knock) and I’m shown through the grand entrance hall and up a sweeping staircase to
the working part of the house, through an antechamber occupied by the Duke’s three personal assistants and into his private oce.
Tony Mountford, aka Monty, has been the Duke’s butler for 12 years after 29 years in the navy, 19 of which were on subs. He is preparing tea (Harvey Nichols’ Earl Grey with lemon) for the boss and coffee (from Edgcumbes of nearby Arundel, watch-keeper’s strength) for me. The pots are silver and the cups are bone china; did you honestly think we’d go to Starbucks?
Before His Grace joins us I have a nose around his extraordinary Duke-cave. A quarter-century of hosting the greatest cars and drivers in motorsport makes for good memorabilia. There’s a gigantic Betty Boop cardboard standee, one of Dick Petty’s feathered stetsons in a glass case, countless steering wheels, helmets and awards, and a large glass desk that has been completely occupied by model cars. I suggest to Monty that it must be a nightmare to dust. ‘A lady comes in once a week,’ he confides. ‘She knows to put it all back in exactly the same place. He’d notice otherwise.’
‘I was going to clear it all out when we last redecorated,’ says the Duke almost apologetically when he arrives. ‘But then they put it all back in again before I could stop them.’
Monty pours the first cups, and leaves us to it. Since 1993 and the first Festival his boss has been the nation’s motorsport fairy godfather. He was then plain Lord March: he inherited the dukedom on the death of his father in 2017. That first Festival was pleasingly amateurish: Charles was up a ladder painting the bridge over the drive as the first cars arrived.
‘We hoped for 2000 people, and the BARC [British Automobile Racing Club] said we’d be lucky to get that. In the end I think we had 20,000 people that first year. But we’ll never really know because most of them broke in.’
The Festival was joined by the Revival in 1998 and the Members’ Meeting in 2014. Together they have become as central to motorsport culture as the great races and rallies they celebrate. The event sells out every year, space limiting numbers to 200,000.
The Festival in particular is now central to the British car industry too. Cars move and make noise, so who wants to see them static and roped-off in an over-heated and over-lit exhibition hall? When Porsche launched the 911 GT2 RS during the Festival of Speed in 2017, the first that the assembled global media saw of it was when Mark Webber ripped past them in one, ⊲
‘I don’t do a bloody thing,’ says the Duke. ‘I just sit here and drink lots of cups of tea.’
This is untrue
deep into three figures down the pit straight at the circuit. You can’t do that at the NEC.
The experiences it can provide mean Goodwood’s revenues grow every year despite visitor numbers being capped. For a man entitled to wear a coronet, the Duke is remarkable modest about the scale and significance of what he has built. ‘I don’t do a bloody thing,’ he says. ‘I just sit here and drink lots of cups of tea.’ This is untrue. I once sat a row in front of him and his staff on an Easyjet bound for the Geneva show, and overheard them planning their military assault on the decision makers of the big car manufacturers. He is intimately involved in every aspect of these events. He once told me how many lightbulbs illuminate the row of street-food stalls in the hangar at the Members’ Meeting.
I wonder if his title impresses CEOs and billionaire collectors, and opens doors which might otherwise stay shut. ‘I think, on the whole, it might mean they think twice about not replying. So in that sense it might help a bit. But I still get plenty of people who never bloody write back.’
With his good looks, subtle but immensely stylish tailoring, statement specs and VPH (Very Posh Hair) he makes the perfect front man for what he has created. He’s not media-shy: you’ll have read interviews with him before. But they often focus on the events. I wanted to ask about him: where his love of cars comes from, how deep it runs.
‘If you really want to know where all this began, it was with this,’ he says, reaching to the shelves crammed with motoring books. This one is kept in easy reach: The Automobile Book from 1962, by Ralph Stein. ‘My grandmother was very good at fostering my relationship with my grandfather [a racer and aviator who brought both to Goodwood] so I’m sure she bought this book, but she said it came from him. Here’s my name: CH Settrington, as I was at the time. I fell in love with these pictures. This book played a big part in all this. I remember at school, aged about 13, desperately trying to go to sleep and thinking about these cars. I’m a firm believer that if you want something enough you can get it. And they’ve all been here, these cars: every single bloody one, really. And a hell of a lot of them I’ve driven.
‘I first drove just down there,’ he says, motioning from the oce window to the drive below. ‘I spent hours terrorising everyone. I’d set off from the stableyard and go up the hill to my grandfather’s house. I’d fly off all the time. The kart used to blow up constantly and I’d have to go to West Ham to get piston rings for it. They were so fragile. They’d break again and I’d go back up to West Ham to get some more. It took all day.’
‘When I was 16 I bought a Morgan 3-Wheeler for 200 quid, from Littlehampton. It was a complete pile of junk, but I was mobile. I had my hat and my goggles. It was cool, until the back wheel fell off.
‘Then I had the gorgeous Datsun Cherry 100A. My father was a great modernist so he thought a Japanese car had to be the thing. I put Cosmic wheels on it and painted all the wheel centres blue. I had the Datsun when I was working with Stanley Kubrick as a photographer, so I was roaring around the country in it.
‘After that I went to Africa for a year and when I came back, rather to my horror my father had given the car to the cook. I felt a little bit hard done by. He didn’t really believe in possessions. It didn’t occur to him that it was important to me. Having a car has always been important to me. She’d used it to pick up milk from the farm and spilled a churn of it in the back. The ⊲
‘I went to Africa for a year and when I came back, to my horror my father had given the car to the cook’
smell was so bad I couldn’t have it back.’ There followed a Mini Cooper on Webers, an Austin-Healey MkIII and then ‘some pretty average road cars’.
‘And then I made my first bit of money [he had successful careers in photography and advertising before taking over the estate]. I saw this Ferrari Lusso for sale. It was mad, this car. It wasn’t that old, because this was 1980. It was absolutely stunning, silver with the light blue interior. It was really cool. It was £21,000 and I went all the way to Yorkshire to see it. And that was my first mistake.’
And why was that a mistake?
‘Because I didn’t buy it! I was always a bit of a Porsche fan anyway, so instead I got a 924 Carrera GT. They were only made in ’81 and it was £17,000. But I had it for a long time. I ran it on the road for 10 years before I blew it up at Silverstone. I did my world record run from Goodwood to London in that. I’ll tell you what the time was, but you can’t print it.’
With most of the world’s car makers as clients, the Duke is more guarded about his current choice of daily driver, but is happy to own up to the two parked outside. We leave the cups to Monty and walk down to poke around them. ‘They launched the 911 GT2 RS here and I said to Porsche I ought to buy one as it’s now a Goodwood car. Then they actually called me up to confirm the sale, so I thought I’d better do it.
‘Charlie and I [his eldest son and heir] picked it up from Mayfair and drove it back here in the pouring rain, so we weren’t really driving it at all. We mainly use it on the track here. We’ve had it since August and done very few miles in it.
‘With the Defender, we heard they were doing a V8, so we had to have one. It’s great fun on shoots. It’s actually number one of 150. I didn’t know they were giving me the first one until it arrived.’
We only have time to drive one before lunch. I pick the Land Rover, reasoning that no experience will ever out-English being driven up the drive of his stately home by a Duke in a V8 Defender. Our progress is anything but stately. Charles drives like he owns the road, which of course he does. This is the same stretch on which he first blew piston rings in his go-kart and he hustles the Defender with the same enthusiasm, making the off-road rubber squirm and squeal with every turn of the wheel and stamp of the brake, and gunning that riotous V8 to place the car’s cliff-like prow inches from photographer Sam as he hangs out of the back of the camera car.
The Duke is chuckling as he drives; genuinely engrossed and delighted. ‘It’s not slow, is it? And it actually goes round corners and stops pretty well. Have you driven one? No? Oh you’ve GOT to have a go. Let’s swap.’
Mucking around with cars like this, there’s a sense of fun and mischief about him that you wouldn’t expect of a 64-year-old duke. But he is a duke, and for all its sharp branding and modern marketing appeal, Goodwood remains one of our great ducal estates. One man is in charge, and his staff sit a little straighter in their seats as he passes. His job is simply to pass ‘this place’, as he refers to it, to his son in better condition than that in which he inherited it.
‘The fundamental thing is that one is responsible for it for a certain amount of time and one doesn’t want to mess it up. For the estate to be sustainable it’s got to make quite a lot of money. We haven’t got any shareholders or anybody else we’re answerable to, so we can do it how we want to. It shouldn’t feel commercial, though. And I hope it doesn’t. It should feel like a huge, great shared experience.’
There’s a loose and unwritten rule that the running of the great estates is passed onto the heir at the age of 40. The current Duke is so indelibly associated with Goodwood’s motorsport renaissance that the idea of anyone else at the wheel is worrying. But Charles’ son Charlie – all heirs to the Duchy of Richmond have been Charles since Charles II illegitimately sired the first in 1672 – plainly has some petrol in that blue blood.
‘He is 24, and has just left Oxford and started his first job. Ultimately he’ll be responsible for the whole estate and fortunately he’s very keen on his cars. He’s got a very nice E-Type, and he keeps trying to get himself insured on the GT2, which is funny. He’s raced at Revival and he’s a good driver. He can take a Nascar up the hill now, he’s really confident.’
Sounds like we’ll be in safe hands. But how much longer do we have this Charles for?
‘The gap between Charlie and me is 15 years bigger than the gap between me and my father was,’ he says. ‘It can be tough. There’s no such thing as a free coffee. I’m rather dreading it’ – you know he isn’t – ‘but you’ve probably got me for another 10 years.’
Nothing will out-English being driven up the drive of his stately home by a Duke in a V8 Defender. Progress
is anything but stately