Having given you a general view of the festival, today we move on to one of the most popular displays at the festival, the Sunday Times Supercar Run. Over 40 of the worlds fastest, most powerful and most exclusive cars could be found here. Modern was the theme and for many of the manufacturers it was their first showing at a UK event.
We managed to catch all the cars in both the paddocks and whilst they were putting in some quality times up on the goodwood hill climb course.
Pagani were showing off their brand new Zonda R. The Zonda R is about as uncompromised as you could ever make a Zonda. Built as a track only car, the rest of the design is just pure fantasy. Holding no restrictions for use, that left the Pagani engineers free to develop a car that has as much horsepower as wanted, no sound restrictions and no aerodynamic restrictions. Pure fantasy!
The Zonda R wowed fans when it took to the hill, it was easily the loudest supercar of the day. We even managed to spot Horacio Pagani (the owner and founder of Pagani) lending a hand to start up the car ready for it’s run up the hill.
As always with the Festival Of Speed, and especially this year given their centenary celebrations, Bugatti put in a strong supercar presence. There were 2 Veyrons down on the entries list, down from the three we saw last year. As ever, we weren’t allowed to get close to the cars so the pictures you see of the Grand Sport and Pur Sang were the best we could manage given the conditions.
Things were equally disappointing when the cars hit the hill, the Pur Sang went so slow that when the Grand Sport was released it easily caught up with the Pur Sang and was reduced to a crawl for the last half of the course. Even more unforgivable was the empty passenger seat that kept appearing in both cars every so often.
Mercedes-McLaren were the best represented companies to display cars at the festval, their entries included the standard SLR, the Roadster, the 722, 722S and the brand new Stirling Moss. In all, the whole SLR range gathered up for a final farewell. As we said earlier there were so many of them that they had to stand outside of the paddock and away from the rest of the entries.
Lewis Hamilton is set to drive on of the Roadsters up the hill this afternoon as the Ayrton Senna McLaren MP4/4 developed gearbox problems on it’s last go up the hill yesterday.
Not only did Mercedes bring the entire SLR range, they also managed to bring down at least 3 different versions of the SL65 AMG Black Series. A German plated example was the one which hit the hill, the other two fulfilled spots on the Mercedes showroom and in the Dunlop tires stand.
Koenigsegg were represented by exotic car dealer Brougtons who had bought a CCX-R down. Different from the CCX-R Edition that was down on the official entry list, the CCX-R stood a little underwhelming between Citreon’s GT Concept and the insane Caparo T1.
We could go on and give you a run-down of ever car that we saw and it’s positives and negatives but we think you’ll probably benefit better from seeing the pictures and videos that we shot. Enjoy and look out for the rest of our Goodwood themed posts.
[Header Picture via PistonHeads.com GFWilliams]
