Watch: all the carnage from Goodwood FOS 2017

2 July, 2017

Goodwood Festival of Speed is known for drawing perhaps the world’s greatest collection of historic performance and race cars — located on Lord March’s massive estate in West Sussex, England — and seeing them thrashed within an inch of their life, as they should be. But, the 1.87km long course proves to be no Sunday drive down your local, with the odd driver getting caught out amongst the hay.

In previous years such incidents have claimed the likes of Rod Millen’s Pikes Peak-winning Tacoma, the class-winning 24 Hours of Le Mans Mazda 767B, and even Ayrton Senna’s Lotus 98T.

This year was no different, and although it hurts us to watch, you just can’t look away:

Just praise the fact that they’re hitting hay bales and not concrete barriers, I suppose …

Design accord

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.