Wednesday 31 July 2019

Goodwood FOS 2019 Review - Paddocks

The Goodwood Festival of Speed occurred two and a half weeks ago and only now have I gotten over how amazing it was. Overall I would say it was better than last years event due to the variety and diversity of the cars scattered around the grounds. This review will be split down into different sections of the festival in order to make this review easier to break down.

RACING PADDOCKS

One key element to the Festival is the race car paddocks as Goodwood is one of the only places to see some of the world's greatest racing cars in one place. The race cars range across all pedigrees of motorsport from Formula One and Le Mans to Rally and Touring Cars, it is an extensive collection of motorsport gems. Some highlights that stood out to me in particular include the mass amount of Porsche 917s dotted about. This year celebrated 50 years of the Porsche 917 and therefore there were 11 in total including the legendary Gulf liveried 917s and a metallic silver road legal 917 which is allegedly daily driven in Sussex. With a value of £14,000,000 for each 917, to see 11 in a row is truly spectacular. In the same paddock as this was a line of all of Michael Schumacher's ex-cars which was a sight to behold also: Bennettons, Jordans, Ferraris and a Mercedes to make up the illustrious career of one of the greatest drivers of all time. These two were incredible sights to see but to me, the best scenes in the paddock was of vintage Le Mans cars. My favourite era of cars are Le Mans from 1966-2008 and therefore there were some utter gems hidden. Bentley's 2003 Speed 8 which took them to a victory at Le Sarthe, the 2002 Dallara SP1 in it's iconic livery, the 1999 BMW V12 LMR which placed 1st in 1999 and the extensive line of modern and vintage Aston Martin racing cars were my highlights by far. Not forgetting to mention that in the Aston Martin section was a DBR1, worth up to £20m, a DB3S worth up to £8m, a DB4 GTZ worth up to £14m and the special project Aston Martins which are near to priceless. Paddocks overall was a little worse than last year as last year featured an MC12 GT1, Jag XJR12 and many other 90s Le Mans legends that unfortunately were not present this year.

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