2016 Goodwood Festival of Speed report

As spectators drifted happily away from the 24th annual running of the Goodwood Festival of Speed held from June 23-26, it must have struck many that the theme for this year’s event – The endless pursuit of power – had been unusually well chosen.

Every Goodwood Festival has a theme but this one was closer to reality than usual: the 2016 event featured a better and more potent crop of race cars – plus a larger collection of spectacular road-going supercars – than any seen previously at the famous Sussex hill-climb, which for all but four days a year, is a quiet single-lane access road connecting Goodwood House to the wooded estate above.

For a while this year, it looked as if founder Lord March’s famous luck with weather was going to run out. It rained heavily and unpredictably on the first and third days of this four-day event, and at times spectators had to cope with mud that, while not in the Glastonbury league, was pretty unpleasant.

But Goodwood’s famous organisation surfaced as it usually does: woodchip shavings were promptly scattered on most walkways — and on Friday and Sunday, at least, the paths and the track were nearly always dry. When they weren’t, well, the lack of grip just made the show more exciting.

On the first day, the gigantic Moving Motor Show marquee looked a bit sparsely populated this year (the organisers used a gigantic café and a stunt-bike display to occupy space usually filled with new cars) but just the same there was no shortage of new road iron. It’s just that most of the models couldn’t yet to be sampled by potential owners. King of the lot was probably the 420kph Bugatti Chiron, whose styling created plenty of controversy, though there was no doubting its speed and power when demonstrated on the hill by Le Mans driver Andy Wallace and company boss Wolfgang Durheimer.