Hi there. I am your new back-page columnist. I would like you to think of me as a friend, a special friend. How can I make you like me?
I could start by telling you that I live just over a mile from the Goodwood Circuit, and what a pain it is to cover two whole miles to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I could be only more obnoxious if I told you that I had a villa on the Monza banking.
Every year I ask myself if it’s worth the effort to leave a warm bed and face the hassle of driving all that way to to see the greatest racing machinery and drivers that the world has to offer?
The trouble is that I feel obliged to go because I helped to organize a campaign to bring racing back to the Goodwood circuit against strident local opposition.
Nick Grace based his Spitfire at Goodwood (RAF Westhampnett, 1939-46), and people who had just moved to the area complained about the noise. A Spitfire on a Battle of Britain airfield is a problem?
These people wrote to the local paper and I wrote back saying that I would take their complaints seriously only if they had the good manners to write in German.
After a macho career in insurance or grocery, these people moved to my city, bought a house close to a racing circuit and airfield and then demanded that, now that they were there, it should be shut down.
When they heard that Lufthansa Cargo was going to fly in cars to the Festival from the States (to an airfield in Scotland, as it happens), they raised objections about a Boeing 747 flying low over their houses – to a grass airfield. A skilled pilot could bring a 747 down at Goodwood, but it would have to leave in crates.
The objectors were constantly batting on about noise “misery” – I think that “misery” is a word which should be reserved for the death of a child. When they discovered that I taught courses at the University of Sussex, a letter was written to the Chancellor, demanding my dismissal on the grounds that in supporting Goodwood, I was engaged in anti-environmental activity. The letter was passed on to the Chancellor, who happens to be Charles March, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, and it just so happens lives at Goodwood House. Neddless to say he did not agree to my dismissal.
I should explain that Chichester is a tiny city with a population of 25,000. It was founded by the Romans in 70 AD, and they walled it in. You can walk from the center to the walls in under five minutes in any direction. The Cathedral is 925 years old, we have two top-class professional theaters, and the beach is seven miles away.
There is a hotel in town, which was used by Lord Nelson and where “Ike” and “Monty” chewed over the D-Day landings.
Hey, we’re also the Tex-Mex cuisine capital of Europe, since El Paso’s fine products are made here under licence.
I love my town. The trouble is that it is so damned perfect that it attracts arseholes who come here to die. They come here to die and – they call it “retirement” – they don’t die. They just whinge and whine.
Now we have come up with the perfect answer to said arseholes, there will be a soap box derby at this year’s Festival. No noise and no pollution, but the arseholes will probably complain because it will be fun, and they do not understand the concept of fun. If you’d spent your life selling insurance, you probably wouldn’t understand fun either.
The idea came about when I was chatting with Steve Massey, a guy I taught at school who is now an established motor racing artist. Somehow conversation turned to soap box carts, and then the penny dropped. Why not have one on the Goodwood hill? We ran it by a few people, and the response, without exception, was, “Great idea. I’m in. What are the rules?”
At the Festival Press Day last year, Sir Stirling (plain Mr. Moss then) ran me up the hill in a Maserati Tipo 63. At the top, I put the idea to him, and within seconds he was designing the cart. He was so taken that he freewheeled the Maserati down the hill to see what a soap box might do. It would be bloody quick is the answer, and the Pheasantry Wall would loom at a rapid rate.
Having the Great One on my side, and having also heard from Gordon Murray, who runs a derby for mates at his farmhouse in France, I put forward the proposal and it was snapped up.
Before long, Goodwood was getting phone calls from people like Ilmor and Penske saying, “We’ve not been invited, we want to be in.”
So the idea has grown. Williams and McLaren are expected to run, though I wouldn’t want to be the person who has to explain to Ron Dennis the concept of a maximum expenditure of £1,000 on materials.
Ford, Chrysler, Rolls-Royce and General Motors are all up for it. In fact, between the Wars, the “General” set building soap box carts as an exercise for its apprentices and will bring genuine Historic machines to the Festival.
One guy, who otherwise restores penny-farthing and bone-shaker bicycles, has built a cart to the specifications set out in a magazine from 1913. It is steered by cables, and the whole front axle turns. Jochen Mass looked at it and said, “That is what I call a real soap box.” Nobody said he was wrong.
G-Force has built a number of carts, including a two-seater for Goodwood. On Press Day, it was driven by Sir Stirling and had a reporter from The Times behind him. The Thunderer devoted most of a page to the soap box derby.
All of us who like cars, especially Historic ones, are kids at heart. The Goodwood Soap Box Derby gets to the kid within us all.
