2025 Festival of Speed...The Future is coming you just can't hear it

I’ve loved cars for as long as I can remember.  As a kid walking along the road I’d be trying to guess what car was coming behind me based on the noise of the engine.  I’d get some right but my ear wasn’t really that good. But you could, with practice, get enough right to feel quite chuffed with yourself.  My Dad had company cars with his job so I got to experience ‘new car day’ more than most of my mates at the time.  I devoured car magazines at any opportunity.

Oddly I was never a huge fan of car shows but would attend some with friends and even had my own car on display at some shows.  I always felt out of place at these events as the level of knowledge of some owners was akin to knowing the Haynes manual for their car word for word.  I just loved cars and driving them.

As I’ve got older I’ve become more particular about where I spend my time and money.  One place that gets plenty of both is Goodwood.  Whether that be the Festival of Speed (FOS), Revival or a Breakfast Club.  Goodwood certainly know how to put on a show and I’ve grown to love visiting this most English of venues.

So this year for the first time, I took both my boys along to their first FOS, or you could actually call it the Festival of Sound because the soundtrack to the event is just as big of a part of this amazing spectacle as looking at and watching the cars.  My boys seem to have both inherited their Dad’s love of cars and what better place than Goodwood to share our love of all things automotive. 

The FOS is a 4 day extravaganza of all things fast and automotive.  A mix of static displays and the now highly anticipated timed runs up the hill, a rally stage, as well as seemingly endless retail opportunities all sitting in some of the most glorious English countryside. In my view what you can see and experience here regardless of how many days you attend, is unmatched by any other event.

One of the highlights for me now are the Drift cars.  A fairly recent addition to the line-up at FOS and perhaps not to everyone’s tastes they really are a spectacle to behold.  The noise of the (mainly rotary) engines, the skill of the drivers, tyre smoke billowing, flames shooting from exhausts, turbo dump valves whooshing and perhaps the gentle whiff of a clutch as they make their cars dance and execute perfectly controlled donuts in front of Goodwood house, before disappearing up the hill in a cloud of tyre smoke, pops and bangs.  It’s a complete riot.

If you’ve not experienced the FOS before, cars and bikes tend to run in batches, drift cars, super cars, cars from certain eras, electric cars....

There's a drift car in there somewhere....

Have you ever been to a concert to see a band you grew up listening to?  They have a great collection of songs you love and often know all the words to.  You take your expensive seat at the concert and they open with a classic, followed by another and another, invoking all sorts of memories for you.  And then after an hour or so they announce they are going to play some new material....you can almost feel the collective sigh in the audience at the mere mention of those two words ‘new material’.  Those two words seem to be a signal to for people to venture to the loo, or if they can afford it, something to eat or drink.  No one seems that interested in the new material.  You almost feel sorry for your favourite band as they play to a swathe of temporarily empty seats.

And its this same collective sigh you can imagine you are hearing at FOS when everyone realises that the next batch of cars up are the electric cars, the automotive equivalent of the ‘new material’.  It’s almost the same outcome as the ‘new material’ announcement at your favourite bands’ concert. Viewing spaces that people have hogged for hours are vacated as they seek an alternative to the almost anti-climax that is the electric car batch.  Time to find the loo, or if you can afford it, a visit to a food truck or a wander amongst the static displays or the retail options.  Anything it seems other than watching the 'new material'.  

There’s little if any anticipation or excitement for what is to come.  Where you can hear the drift cars moving from the paddock to the start of the hill run all you have now is silence. You don’t hear the cars set off from the start line, there’s no sound track to follow to indicate where the cars are so you might get your camera ready for that killer shot.  And then all of a sudden a car is there....no flames, no noise, no nothing, aside from the odd lame attempt to add a synthesised ‘car’ noise over the hum of battery and motor.  Even the one electric drift car running this year struggled to woo the crowds.  It’s driver attempting but not quite executing those same perfect drift car donuts performed by the rotary powered cars, I’m guessing something to do with the on/off power delivery of his bank of batteries.

Don’t get me wrong, taking the S from FOS, then the speeds some of these electric cars reach is nothing short of amazing. I’ve driven electric cars and the acceleration is neck-snapping.  As a committed petrol head you can never fail to be fascinated by this speed and acceleration, whatever is creating it, especially so when it comes in the shape of a 2 tonne Rolls Royce cutting the grass and kicking up dust trails as it struggles to overcome the laws of physics to keep itself on the tarmac part of the hill. The sight of the latest incarnation of the Ford Super Van silently crushing the hill, sparks flying from its super low floor (and settling light to the safety bails of hay) has to be seen to be believed. But for all this warp speed action inevitably its missing the soundtrack that takes me back to the younger me, trying to guess what it might be.

But, like the concert you wandered out of when the new material came on, the old material you love eventually comes back on and you wander back to your seat to listen again.  And so it is at the FOS as the next batch of cars makes its way to the start line again, and we retake our vantage points to hear the next track from the combustion engine orchestras greatest hits. Inevitably more electric cars come past and as they do, me and my boys and our friends start to move away from our vantage point.  And as we do, my friend says to my boys “if that’s the sound of your future, I prefer your Dads and my past”.

That really made me stop and think.  The Future is coming, you just cant hear it.

Goodwood House

A lovely way to enjoy FOS