L7s Goodwood Festival of Speed PICS! thread

lol, to be fair I do cheat a bit, rather like Master Fry with his earpiece to the QI Gnomes! Some of the factoids contained herein are from memory (which like as not means I made them up ), some are cribbed from the excellent FoS programme and some are simply stream of consciousness drivel and bear little relation to anything. Seems to work though


I remember seeing and interview with Stirling Moss once (he knew a thing or two about going quick, y'know) and he said for ages he was baffled by his team-mate and genuine living legend Fangio. It appeared that when he drove F1 cars, Fangio was pretty much unbeatable, even when they were in identical machinery. Yet in sportscars, Moss could give the Argentine a run for his money and even beat him. Eventually he discovered that Fangio had no truck with tedious conventions like looking through a corner into the apex and then to the outside clipping point and all that rubbish, like conventional wisdom dictated. Instead, he was looking at exactly where his inside front wheel was in the corner at all times. When he was in a closed-body sportscar, he could no longer see the wheel and therefore couldn't judge the corner so well.

Strangely, Valentino Rossi once said similar in an interview, back when he was at the absolute zenith of his powers and pretty much invincible. Asked about his awkward-looking style of looking down at the front of the bike rather than through the corner he responded that it was because he wanted to see what the wheel was doing in relation to the corner. "Why do I want to look up the track?" he asked. "I know where it goes, it's the same every lap".

So, we'd better look at some closed-bodied sportscars then, hadn't we? And since we were on about Maseratis, we'll stick with them, yeah? How about a lovely A6GCS, then. This Colombo-designed 2 litre six-pot 1955 car competed against much larger-engined sportscars and yet managed a third in the Mille Miglia, proving yet again size isn't everything. It shows the lovely twin-bubble arch style that was a Maserati signature for the longest time. And those gorgeous duck-egg blue Veglia gauges...









Perhaps the ultimate expression of this style, and certainly the best known, was the "Birdcage". The outrageously exaggerated arches stretched taut over the intricate yet extremely strong network of the tube frame that gave the Tipo 61 its name. This was never intended as a works racer, rather it was as mass-produced as Maserati got in the late 50s in order to sell to customer race teams.





Some customers took things a bit further than the little birdcage's envisioned design brief, however. Tommy Atkins built this Cooper T61-P "Monaco" car for Roy Salvadori to race and replaced what he saw as the inadequate Maserati 2.9 litre four cylinder with a 4.3 litre V8. Needless to say, the embarrassment of power somewhat overwhelmed the handling, rendering the car a beast to drive. Although it did win the Goodwood Whitsun Trophy in 1964







The Tipo 151/3 was a rather less elegant solution to racing design, following the trend for "breadvan" styling in the early 60s. Despite widened track and lowered engine, the untested aerodynamics were form rather than function and despite the purposeful looks, the car was very unstable at speed.





The Maserati Centenary was in no way content to rest upon laurels of glories past, however. Nope, it came right up to date with an impressive line-up of modern machinery brought out since the rejuvenation of the firm under Fiat ownership and Ferrari guidance



Indeed, this MC GT3 is the latest car to enter the racing crucible, having literally just been homologated and not had the chance to compete at the time of the Festival. If it goes as well as it looks...



And there was a smattering of MCs as well, such as the baby blue MC 12 GTT that won the 2010 drivers and team titles in the GT1 World Championship. Yeah, maybe it's a Ferrari Enzo in a fat suit. And that's bad because...?







That car was a development of this one, the MC12 that won every title from 2004 to 2008 and only the rules changes really made an update necessary



Arty damp wheel photo included purely because I have a perverse fetish for proper centre-lock motorsports wheels and the addition of some raindrops just enhances my peccadillo...



The final MC12, and our last Maserati (in this section, anyway) was a bit special. In fact, it was making its debut here at the Festival. Given a special one-off paintscheme specifically commemorating the Centenary, it was truly a mobile work of art. And as it proved on the Sunday in the hands of Michael Bartels by setting the second quickest time of the weekend, it's an extremely capable track weapon as well. The artists had airbrushed scenes from Maserati's illustrious racing history into the gunmetal paint, but you had to catch them just so to make them out. Change the angle and they vanished and all you could see were the bolder, obvious "calendar" designs. An excellent piece of painting,but as you'll appreciate, rather tricky to photograph successfully. Hopefully enough of the pictures came out for you to see them though. I hope so, I stood in the rain on Thursday evening for ages playing around with focal lengths trying to get these, lol









We already touched on them with that beautiful Sharknose, but it can't have escaped your notice that Maserati weren't the only red-painted hallowed Italian marque in attendance. There aren't many of Johnny-come-lately Ferraris here in the Cathedral, most habituate the upper paddocks, but there are a few. Such as this adorably pretty 250GT LWB coupe. I guess the Masons weren't around this year to bring their 250 GTO...





Before ol' Enzo upstarted to think he could build his own cars he was, of course, a glorified spanner monkey crew chief for the eldest child of Italian racing dynasties. In fact, this is just my perverted sense of humour. Ferrari under the banner of the Scuderia Ferrari team, were a force of nature that decimated all on the tracks running a prodigiously capable race effort pre-war. And the eldest and grandest of Italian racing marques was of course Alfa Romeo. And if anything ever encapsulated the Italian racing spirit, it's this photo. The team at the FoS spent a lot of the weekend sitting on the wheels or bodywork of their priceless and irreplaceable museum exhibit vehicular charges, chatting, drinking and generally treating visitors with language-barrier fuelled and typically Latinate meh disdain. If they wanted a crafty fag, they observed the many "No Smoking" signs around the paddock to get up and wander off behind their stand banner to "hide" while they puffed away. That this put them about ten feet away from the refuelling station seemed of the absolute least interest to them. Meanwhile, chubby dude sits talking staccato rapid-fire Italian into his phone, accompanied by violent hand waving, at a volume slightly below the pain threshold. Italians, eh. They're just effortlessly cool somehow. They just are...



Anyway, some Alfas then. This elegant 750 Competizione was designed as a prototype for sportscar racing, with a one-off Abarth chassis and Boane styling, but as it turned out, Alfa got the design of their production cars so right that they were perfectly adequate and the expensive prototype project was shelved



The Giulietta SZ Coda Tronca ("trimmed tail") was an absolute triumph of slippery design, capable of over 120mph from just the 97bhp developed by its 1300 4-cylinder engine. It was a spaceframe chassis, with the Kamm tail that gave it the name a vital part of its body shape.





Another little Alfa that punched well above its weight was the GTA 1300 Junior. The bigger 1750 Giulias may have been the poster girls, but the little GTA was a masterpiece of tuning. Adding Spica fuel injection to the production street car raised the engine output from 100 to 163bhp!



The Tipo 159 is perhaps better known by the name "Alfetta" and is a genuine giant of the tracks, even in this company. Enzo Ferrari had a significant hand in the development of the car, frustrated by the decimation of all opponents wreaked by the Mercedes and Auto Union state-sponsored German juggernaut. The War interrupted the Alfetta's progress, but by 1950 it had hit its stride, winning the first F1 championship. This feat was repeated in '51. The fact a certain Juan Manuel Fangio was one driver and Guiseppe Farina the other may have helped