Goodwood Festival Of Speed - A - Z

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Veuve Clicquot

I guess it has to be something pretty extraordinary to get a name check in a list about a festival of speed when you are a company that produces champagne but Veuve Clicquot has been at the festival in some form or another for as long as I can remember.

With its dedicated Rose Bar nestled in the shade of the trees outside of the stable yard right across from the Cartier “Style Et Luxe” which is nicely sandwiched with a further seafood and champagne bar on the other side and running alongside the track and sponsors enclosure. Alongside its partnership with the festival, it also provides all of the champagne for the prize winners across the weekend.

The history of Veuve Clicquot is really interesting however I just want to add a little bit on Madame Clicquot, a resourceful woman with a force of character and an eye for innovation, recovering from the loss of her husband leaving her widowed with a three-year-old daughter she convinced her father-in-law to allow her to manage the business.

After a poor beginning with very low sales, Europe at war and naval blockades hampering sales and the threat of bankruptcy looming Madame Clicquot did not give up. Working with her cellar-man Antoine-Aloys De Muller to repurpose old tables to hold their bottles at an angle, by turning the bottle by a quarter-turn every day over the course of two months it allowed the lees and sediment to settle in the neck of the bottle, this solved the problem of cloudy wine and has become known as Remuage, a process that can now be done manually or using automated Gyropalettes working 24 hours a day and turning up to 500 bottles at a time cutting the time taken from six weeks down to one whilst losing none of the quality.

Madame Clicquot was also very intelligent and whilst the naval blockades had destroyed most commercial shipping during the wars, she had been smuggling vast quantities of her best wine out of France and storing it as far away as Amsterdam whilst waiting for peacetime. As soon as peace was declared the shipments made their way to Russia and beat her competitors by weeks. The quality of her product alongside the head start gave her such an edge that Tsar Alexander declared that her champagne was the only kind that he would drink, at that time there was no better marketing than money could buy.

From risking her inheritance and the early beginnings when the bottles didn’t even have labels to the now instantly recognisable yellow label that takes pride of place on all of its bottles Madam Clicquot must go down as one of the most innovative business people of all time, and testament to this is that by the time Madam Clicquot passed away Sales had gone from a mere 10,000 up to 750,000 and even now, over 150 years since she passed away her champagne is the tipple of choice for so many people around the world, and of course at Goodwood festival of speed.

Vendors

Looking to build on this business acumen is the huge swathe of vendors who have set up in the smaller white tents that skirt the edge of the cricket green and can stretch up and out to the Jaguar Landrover experience. These much small (in most cases) tents matching the white-topped coverings from the paddock areas house some of the most amazing items which you can purchase.

Of course, there are a lot of car-related items, you can buy toy cars, highly detailed die-cast models, you can even buy furniture that’s made out of cars, a glass tabletop sitting on top of an engine, a side table made out of a wheel and tyre, there are race used gears that have been turned into clocks and paperweights.

And if you like the race used items there are plenty of these too, overalls and helmets obviously cost a little more but if you want the real stuff, you can even find various parts of cars to purchase. Now of course you can’t find enough parts to make your own version and a large portion of the available parts have been completely obliterated in an incident, hoovered up by a marshal at the event, sold on and then bought here to be resold to you.

If this is a little out of your price range then you can just move along a tent or two and find team merchandise, t-shirts, hats, keyrings, teddy bears in overalls and other such items for you to peruse. If you want a new jacket but want something a little more retro or a little more quality then you will find proper leather jackets on sale along with fashionable scarfs and gloves, I do even seem to remember seeing a stand selling hiking socks and poles and other mountaineering paraphernalia.

Maybe you are after a new toolbox and all of the contents that go in it, maybe some polishes and waxes might take your fancy, and you might need them because given the fact you can also visit stands which sell you imported mustangs, awesome motorbikes and even prestige vehicles such as an Aston Martin or a Ferrari. These are all out of my price range however do make sense, the ones that don’t quite so much are the ones selling hot tubs and (again a vague memory) small boats, garden furniture and animals carved from wood. I mean they must make some money otherwise why would they be here but just be prepared to see some things you may not expect.

I spend a lot of my time looking around the artwork and photograph tents, this is both because I am hugely impressed by the skills and presentation of the artwork but also because maybe one day, I can have my own tent and sell my own images (very unlikely, let's just focus on getting the white Goodwood Photographer bib, for now, shall we).

Virtual Reality

A growing avenue of the festival is the use of virtual reality, I really enjoyed doing a virtual lap “in” a Mercedes F1 car, the use of the 360-degree camera meaning I could see absolutely everything as we zoomed around at speed, I actually went on this a couple of times just because there was so much to watch and to try and spot, with the camera being set higher you didn’t get the drivers full perspective and of course, they can’t poke their head out of the cockpit and look back over the sidepods and beyond the rear wing but being able to do just that was a real treat.

Even better than that was the Roborace VR Simulator, this took virtual reality to a whole new level and is truly immersive virtual reality done right. Obviously being a Roborace car there isn’t a race seat to sit in so instead you laid on a D-box system which had been built on top of a Roborace chassis, complete with grips of course, then donning the VR Headset you were dropped straight on to the Goodwood hill climb.

The whole system bumps and shakes and tilts as you race up the course, and it's not just a video you can look all around you as you zip up the course, now I can’t remember if there was also a fan that blew across the top of your head as you accelerated and braked your way up the course but if there wasn’t my brain added in that part as I certainly remember feeling it.

The future of VR is going to explode and when it does, being able to do things like this, to experience in such a real way rather than just on a screen is going to bring so many more people into the world of motorsport it's going to be amazing.

Venue / Vast

As you can probably tell by now the venue for the festival of speed is vast, I am not sure of the actual size but what I can tell you is that on Thursday last year I walked 15.3 miles as I made my way around the festival when I went back on Sunday my wife and I walked 8.9miles (we may have used a shuttle or two) I would also say that there were things I missed on the Thursday but did go and see on Sunday so it's pretty clear just how big the venue is.

The venue itself is picturesque, almost like a painting from a canvas come to life, even with all of the structures and displays and hay bales and sponsor boards the whole area is surrounded by greenery, trees are aplenty and when you are a little higher up you can see the rolling hills of the south downs and you can even just about see the sea.

Pride of place though is Goodwood house, built-in circa 1600 it has across the years been added to, a south wing added by Matthew Brettingham and a north wing by James Wyatt. Sir William Chambers then designed the stable block and James Wyatt added more of his own work by designing the kennels.

Even the now distinctive copper domes were added later rather than being part of the original house as a way to add unity across the new wings which had been added.

Being a grade 1 listed building, you can imagine the history that the households, stories of construction beset with delays due to long-standing debts only to be rejuvenated when an inheritance was received, there are such different characters that have created the lineage whilst being masters of the home that you could barely make it up.

The 3rd Duke of Richmond, Lennos and Aubigny was the maser of the Ordnance and founded the royal Ordnance Survey to map the whole of Britain at one inch to the mile, The 4th Duke was a military man and via a pit stop in Brussels became the Governor-General of Canada, the 6th Duke who was a prominent politician and the queen even recreated the title of the Duke of Gordon for him.

The 9th Duke was passionate about cars and planes, even training as a motor mechanic at Bentley and who was the person responsible for turning parts of the airfield into the Goodwood Motor circuit, the 10th Duke strengthened the estate with a focus on the (horse) racecourse whilst also being involved with the church of England as a member of the General Synod and a church commissioner which brings us right up to the 11th Duke, the current chairman of the Goodwood Group of companies and the founder of the Festival of speed.

All of these men and their families living their extraordinary lives in and around Goodwood house which could easily be an excuse to wall it off and shut out the general public but the exact opposite is true, we are welcomed with open arms every single year, and not just at the festival of speed.

Vibrant

There is clearly a vibrant atmosphere which I have covered a lot so I just want to take a minute to appreciate some of the insane colour schemes and liveries that are on show at the festival, I won’t start a which livery is the best conversation or anything like that as those conversations are best left for the car ride home but what I discuss is the changes that you can see from the early days to now.

On the older cars, there is pretty much one colour across the whole car, if it’s Ferrari it’s red, if it's Aston Martin it's green etc. and all of these look like they have been painted using a tin of paint from a local hardware store, in some cases, I do not doubt that that is exactly what has happened. As we move forwards you can see the detailing start to come in, brass being used here and there, different grills, names starting to appear in fine lettering to stand out, blue on white and other such examples, even small flags appearing by the doors or the wheels.

Then you start to see the sponsors and the logos coming in, again in the earlier days these would just be the logo painted onto the side of the cars, with some of the American cars we start to see sharply contrasting colours from bright yellow on a dark rich blue spelling out the names and numbers on the cars, Cartoon images of Tony the tiger alongside painted hawks and emblems painted on the noses of the cars much like the old planes form the war.

As we get right up towards the modern era you saw whole liveries changing colour to match their sponsor, some of the most famous ones would be the John Player Special Lotus, the Gulf Oil GT40, the various Martini and Rothman liveries also appear across a range of cars at the festival, probably the most vibrant one though is the Marlboro sponsored cars, a simple white and orange design which are as identifiable from a mile as much as they are from a metre, the bright orange flashes were easily spotted on screen during any event.

In recent years a lot of teams have moved to more of a matt finish and not everyone is a fan of this style, I think it can be done well but have also seen some not-so-great examples. I have also noticed a trend towards reflective materials and liveries, some cover the whole car and some are just to add a bit of punch or detail to a logo both of which (again) can be done well or badly.

I think the one thing you realise once you get to see these cars for yourself is that they are not always quite the same colour as you see on TV, in fact, the teams will purposefully tweak the colour of the liveries and stickers and paint specifically so that when viewed by a TV audience they are exactly as they should be even if that means you have to sacrifice the looks on the car itself by just a little bit.