Goodwood Festival of Speed Hillclimb

Hillclimb · UK, West Sussex

1.16 mile of flint walls at the Festival of Speed.

1.16 miles of asphalt up the driveway of the Goodwood estate in West Sussex. Each summer Lord March throws the Festival of Speed and turns the hillclimb into the closest thing the car world has to a UN summit, F1 cars, Le Mans winners, rally legends, Pikes Peak record-holders, drift demonstrators all running the same flint-walled course over four days.

For drift specifically Goodwood matters because Mad Mike Whiddett brings his BadBul/MADBUL 4-rotor RX-7 nearly every year. The combination of impossibly tight gravel-edged corners, the flint wall the locals call "Molecomb" and the unmistakable scream of a 26B at full noise has become an annual ritual.

The Festival is the closest motorsport gets to a cultural-importance peer review. If your car is here, somebody thought it mattered. The hillclimb is short enough that pristine prototype cars can run with no consequence; it is intimate enough that you stand five metres from the flint wall and hear the apex.

Source: Ashley Pomeroy · CC BY-SA 4.0