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Photos from Goodwood Festival of Speed 2009

Goodwood on Sunday was fantastic!

From 2009 Goodwood Festival of Speed

I have uploaded 319 photos of various quality from the day, you may view them here, if you so choose:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/PatrickWotton/2009GoodwoodFestivalOfSpeed#

I had a fantastic day which capped a great weekend, and I was well and truly shattered at the end of it, so tired! Absolutely 100% worth it though and I recommend the event to anybody (with a few caveats – more on that another time).

As you will have hopefully seen on my Twitter feed or in the photoset above I got photos of Stirling Moss, John Surtees, Jenson Button, Jay Leno, Jesse James and a huge number of classic, priceless racing cars. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I can sit down to write the posts! That’s a plural because I may do a large post or several smaller updates, I need to work out which will work better.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the photos, and I’ll also point you in the direction of first-time attendee Lukeh who’s blog post sums it up perfectly. I’ll link to more people’s blogs/photos in future entries.

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2009 Goodwood Festival of Speed

Tomorrow I will be attending the Goodwood Festival of Speed for the 3rd time.

I had been considering it for a while and had pretty much decided against it until midweek, when I realised I urgently needed – yes needed – to get to a motorsport event, not having been to one since September. Luckily the tickets were still available on Thursday morning (is this normal or are sales slow?) so this is a very last-minute decision but one I don’t regret at all.

I will be attempting to tweet comments during the day to @TooMuchRacing but this will very much depend on the phone signals. There will be a lot of people in one place in a rural area so the network may get overloaded, in which case you’ll have to wait for me to upload pics from my camera when I get home tomorrow night (don’t tweet and drive, kids).

In the meantime, feel free to enjoy my photos from 2002 and 2003 visits in my Picasa album. I am not claiming they are masterpieces but I hope they give a flavour of the event!

I’ll probably be fairly incognito not being one to shout about myself, and I’ll be attending as a fan rather than trying to get any media access as many bloggers do – so this blogger will be deploying in stealth mode. Not to mention I have nothing to identify myself as TooMuchRacing other than telling people. I intend to have a busy yet relaxed day, if possible.

Will blog upon my return!

On The Limit

There are those who think F1 tracks and IndyCar non-ovals are ‘road courses’, which hold ‘road races’. These are not road races. In Europe these are just called race tracks.

No.

This is a road race:

[note – this is quite long, over 10 mins]

The Isle of Man TT races. Insane isn’t it?! And that’s just the production class! The top race-spec Superbikes go even faster, unfortunately the only vids I can find are crappy home-video ones.

They also race sidecars, not your ordinary Wallace & Gromit affair either (keep watching through 8 minutes for the superb helicopter shots):

Race of Champions 2008

At the end of a hard year of racing, drivers like to relax with a little challenge. A head-to-head competition in equal cars around a circuit laid inside Wembley Stadium. The Race of Champions.

The 2008 event happens tomorrow and the draw has been made for both the Nations Cup and for the main event, the Race of Champions. Britain gets two teams, presumably as the host nation.

You have to take this loosely, some Nations aren’t really nations, some Champions aren’t really champions. Don’t let that spoil it because this is a varied and eclectic line-up.

Nations Cup
Heat 1: France vs Scandinavia*
Heat 2: USA vs Autosport Team GB
Heat 3: F1 Racing GB vs All Stars**
Heat 4: Germany vs Ireland

* Sweden and Denmark.
** The All Stars team was formerly Australia, however Mark Webber broke his leg and his place was taken by the Spanish champion of this year’s British F3 series, Jaime Alguersuari.

Each heat is a ‘best of 3’ and each team has 2 drivers.

Race of Champions
Gareth McHale (rally) vs David Coulthard (F1)

Adam Carroll (GP2, A1GP) vs Mattias Ekstrom (DTM, reiging ROC champ)

Tom Kristensen (Le Mans, DTM) vs Michael Schumacher (F1)

Jason Plato (BTCC) vs Andy Priaulx (WTCC)

Tanner Foust (drifting) vs Jenson Button (F1)

Troy Bayliss (Superbikes) vs Sebastian Vettel (F1)

Jaime Alguersuari (F3) vs Carl Edwards (NASCAR)

Yvan Muller (WTCC) vs Sebastien Loeb (World Rally)

Each heat is a ‘best of 3’. Tanner Foust is in because Travis Pastrana, star of last year’s event, got injured messing with a motorcross bike during the week. And as mentioned above, Mark Webber is out after injuring himself in an endurance event he organised.

Coverage

You can watch the ROC live on Sunday from 13:50 GMT (14:50 CET) at RaceOfChampions.com and simulcast at a variety of websites including Autosport and Pitpass.
In Britain it will be live on Sky Sports Extra and Sky Sports 3 HD (later there is delayed coverage on British Eurosport).
Across Europe it’ll be live on Eurosport International.
Fans in the US can see it live on Discovery HD.
Further coverage details.

The Nations Cup begins at 14:30 GMT, the Race of Champions gets under way at 17:30 GMT. Each competition is scheduled for two hours and there will be activities before and between the events.

I was at Wembley last year. It was a little over-priced, it was hard to see the drivers, there were big gaps in the crowd and it was VERY cold.
But there were solid reasons for all of these and the organisers have worked to overcome them this year. The new KTM X-Bow is open-topped so you can see the drivers more easily. The prices are lower this year. And the newly-rebuilt Wembley is frikkin’ HUGE (it looks great at night) – you can’t expect to fill a place that size first time out. I hope word of mouth and the lower prices make for increased attendance. I’m not going, I said last year it wasn’t worth going to it every year. Now I kind of wish I was.

You can see my 2007 photos here.