Goodwood Festival of Speed

For the first time in three years Goodwood had good weather, blazing sunshine for the whole weekend in fact.

Once again Lord March had laid on a spectacular display of cars and motor cycles and once again Neil Roden and his team of volunteers had responsibility for spectator control.

The battle for best time up the hill between McRae in the Ford and Burns in the Subaru was being hyped up on the Friday with rumours that Ford had been practising on a similar piece of road for over a week and that Subaru were going to dramatically increase the power of the Subaru by changing the electronics. Richard Burns seemed to enjoy himself at Goodwood chatting freely to anyone who approached and wandering around the park visiting the various stands. Colin McRae seemed less happy and seemed reluctant to talk or sign autographs and even received a warning from the Clerk of the Course for not wearing overalls on one of his runs.

The Subaru beat the Ford Focus on five runs up the hill, running 2nd fastest overall behind Nick Heidfeld in last year's F1 McLaren. The final run was scheduled for 5 pm on the Sunday and for some reason, not explained by the commentators, McRae and the Focus did not appear, but as Burns said 'Being fastest five out of six times is good enough.' On his sixth run up the hill Burns celebrated his class win by pulling a series of 'doughnuts' in the top paddock – something that is not allowed on WRC events.

Nick Heidfeld was awesome in the McLaren reducing the hill record by some seven seconds on Saturday and shaving yet another second off his time on the last run on Sunday. He actually felt he could have gone faster if the rally cars hadn't taken to the grass on some of the corners and put a lot of dirt onto the track!

It was not a good event for Jonathan Palmer. Mindful of his accident on the way to the start 3 years ago he was told to take care on the way from the paddock to the start as the spectator crossings were open. He managed to go off again, damaging the McLaren Honda, which apparently had Ron Dennis spitting blood.

Dave Jenkins was spectating with a friend and spent some time chatting with a Japanese competitor in the paddock. The final part of the conversation went like this:
Japanese: 'I have to be careful with this car when I go up the hill, it belongs to the company and I have not driven it before.'
Dave's friend: 'Yes, don't crash – it would be a bad career move'
As the car pulled away someone from the adjacent garage came over and said:
'Did you realise who that was?'
'No'
'Oh, it's the President of Honda.'

A short time later Dave was relating the story to Dave Walton who was one of the Sector Commanders. A lady overhearing the conversation came up to him saying ' I'm from Renault, our chairman is on our stand perhaps you would like to come over and how you say, put your foot in it again!'