You smelt them, it was said of the Mongol hordes, before you heard them, and by the time you heard them it was too late. At the Goodwood Festival of Speed it’s the other way round: you hear the intoxicating yowl of high-revving engines before you’re close enough to smell the heady mixture of high-octane, burnt oil and hot rubber. But by then it’s too late — next year you’ll be back for more.
Goodwood is motoring’s Glyndebourne, glamorous, smart and bucolic with the South Downs as backdrop and its origins in aristocratic hedonism. On Revival days you wear period costumes to go with your car, assuming you can find a hat to match a 1934 Hispano-Suiza and have worked out how to exit elegantly from a 1929 Blower Bentley.
At this year’s 26–29 June Festival of Speed, however, the big theme is Mercedes as the company celebrates 120 years in motorsport with a fleet of centurion racers and those gleaming, all-conquering, breathtaking 1930s Silver Arrows.
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