Majestic motors
Thousands at Festival of Speed
The 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed once again attracted thousands of spectators and world-famous motoring stars. Starting on Thursday and running until Sunday, this year’s event had a theme of ‘Speed Kings, Motorsport Record Breakers’. The festival included exclusive previews of historic and contemporary famous cars, displays from car manufacturers including Mercedes Benz, Porsche and Volkswagen, a wide range of refreshments and much more.
If you thought Goodwood’s Festival of Speed was just about cars then this year’s celebration would make you think again.
Of course, cars are central to the annual global-leading Festival and as the Duke of Richmond explained at the launch, the Festival of Speed is the only event in the world which covers all genres of motor sport all at the same time and spanning 100 years.
But he is passionate about looking forward to developing technologies which stretch way beyond today’s understanding of road transport in a way that nowhere else does - an ambition which underpins FOS Future Lab showcased at the Festival.
Speaking on the first day [Thursday July 3] at the aerodrome, the Duke said: “Goodwood has been a traditional estate for over 300 years but also a highly innovative and enterprising one.
“Our little mantra here is horse racing, motor racing, golf, flying, shooting and cricket. And there’s been a serious following of sport here since the 18th century. It all began with fox hunting and we actually run the hounds through all the cars at the members’ meeting in the spring just to remind everybody of that. It causes quite a stir.
“The first cricket match was played here in 1702 and was one of the first ever - maybe even the first ever - and we have the earliest written rules of cricket in our archive.
“The third Duke introduced horse racing just on top of the Downs in 1801.
“And the seventh’s Duke’s children built the golf course before the first world war. My grandfather built this [motor racing] circuit and we opened immediately after World War Two. The first track opened in September 1948.
“This was a very important airfield in World War Two. It played a very important part in the Battle of Britain and we had some of the greatest pilots based here too during that time.
“He was a great innovator, my grandfather Freddie, and also a very good engineer and pilot and he built a lot of his The Duke opening the event with the new Land Rover Defender Prototype
own aeroplanes, cars and flew a lot of them from here so it’s very appropriate what’s going on here today.
“It was here, as I say, that my grandfather turned the perimeter track which was a Battle of Britain airfield where they used to push the Spitfires around into a motor
circuit in 1948 - and that much to my fury as a small boy that he decided to close it for all sorts of reasons. He didn’t like wings on cars which was one of the things he had objections to and in 1966 he closed it down.
“And when I came back to live at Goodwood and took over from my father in the early 1990s one of the first things I tried to do was get this great race track reopened again. And there was a massive wall of resistance which caused me quite a lot of problems and it wasn’t until 1998 that we eventually got this going again.