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The Best Towing Trucks for Under $20,000Highlights from the Goodwood Festival of Speed
Automotive enthusiasts gathered at the Goodwood Festival of Speed for a celebration of all things fast, past and present, from supercars to steam cars.
What is Goodwood?
The annual Goodwood Festival of Speed, held at the Duke of Richmond’s Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, brings together some of the world’s fastest cars from yesteryear and today. It’s a gathering of racecars new, old, and sometimes very old from F1, Indy, rally, GT, and more. In an afternoon at Goodwood, it’s standard fare to see spaceship-like supercars and century-old steam cars alike taking their loop around the track. This year’s festival offered a cornucopia of automotive wonders from fan cars and fast vans to the winged wonder of the world’s wildest WRX.
If the scream of exotic engines and wafting of tires smoke through the air is what gets you out of bed in the morning, take a trip to next summer’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. For all those who missed it this year, here’s some of the 2024 highlights.
Subaru Project Midnight WRX
One of this year’s most noteworthy cars was the new Project Midnight WRX, Subaru’s follow-up to last year’s Airslayer rallycross car which set the Lightning Lap record for 2023. The new Project Midnight is kitted out in a carbon fiber wide body with a Batman-level rear wing. Total weight is a svelte 2,469 lbs., half a ton less than the factory WRX. Its turbocharged flat-four is tuned to a dizzying 670 horsepower and 680 lb.-ft. of torque with a banshee-howling 9,500-rpm redline. The Project Midnight WRX was driven by former F1 driver and rallycross champion Scott Speed to a narrow second-place finish at this year’s Goodwood hill climb “Shootout” with a time of 46 seconds. It was bested by an equally outrageous vehicle, Ford’s SuperVan 4.2.
Ford SuperVan 4.2
Like the Project Midnight WRX, the SuperVan 4.2 is a sequel, in this case of the 1,973-horsepower SuperVan 4 of last year’s Goodwood. The new SuperVan 4.2 dials back the insanity only slightly to a more reasonable (?) 1,400 horsepower emanating from a 50-kWh battery pack and sent to three motors, one in front and two in the rear. If you thought the Project Midnight rear wing was nutty, the SuperVan 4.2 says, cool, hold my can of Planters. Its triple-decked rear wing provides 4,400 lbs. of downforce at 150 mph. Driven by 2-time Le Mans-winner Romain Dumas, the SuperVan 4.2 wailed and whined its way to a top finish the Shootout with a final time of 43.99 seconds.
Ford Raptor T1+
Ford wasn’t done with making things that are as fast as they look. The Raptor T1+ is a Dakar-style Baja truck/buggy for the ages. It rides on gnarly 37-inch BF Goodrich tires with a 16-inch clearance backed by a 5.0L Coyote V8. The T1+ isn’t just for show either, it’s scheduled for major off-road competitions later this year including the Dakar Rally, Baja Hungary, and the Rallye de Maroc.
McLaren Solus GT
For something almost completely different there’s was the McLaren Solus GT, which resides in the same linage as the F1, P1, and other Ultimate Series McLarens. This is the second year at Goodwood for the one-seat hypercar, now in a brilliant white rather than orange. If the Solus looks to you like something from a video game that’s because it is; modeled as it was after the Vision Gran Turismo from the 2017 Gran Turismo Sport video game.
The “Beast of Turin” and Other Goodwood Highlights
There were dozens and dozens of other incredible vehicles in attendance at Goodwood this year. The “Beast of Turin,” a vintage 1910 Fiat S76 racecar, was once again making laps, fire spitting from its side exhaust ports. Additional antique classics included a Salvesen Steam Wagonette steam car and a Bugatti Type 35B, among many others.
There were also plenty of concept cars on display. The upcoming Honda Prelude intrigued attendees despite black-out windows and tightlipped PR staff providing no new info on the hotly anticipated new hybrid sport coupe. The new Ford Capri gave us all flashbacks of the Mustang Mach-E by taking a storied nameplate and applying it to an electric crossover. A bit hotter was MG’s Cyber GTS concept, a coupe version of their Cybster all-electric cabriolet, which aims for a release as part of next year’s 60th brand anniversary.
High-end racecars and supercars were in abundance at Goodwood, including cars from Ferrari, McLaren, Aston Martin, Pagani, Koenigsegg, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Lamborghini. Even more exotic were appearances by the Czinger 21C, the Gurney Eagle FA74, a Rimac Nevera 15th Anniversary Edition, Polestar’s BST concept, and McMurtry’s latest version of the Sperling electric fan car, which first debuted at Goodwood in 2021 and set a new Goodwood hill climb record last year of 39.08 seconds. The only off note of the weekend was the Lotus Evija X, which got a bit too squirrely out of the gate and promptly crashed into Goodwood’s signature haybales within feet of the starting line. Lotus says driver error (turning off traction control) rather than mechanical failure was to blame.
The Goodwood Festival of Speed once again lived up to its name as a unique celebration of all things fast.
