Jaguar XJL Long Wheelbase
Mercedes E Class - lovely-
Lexus LFA 
Lexus bike, runs on NiMh laptop batteries which last 2 hours 
Goodwood has it's own radio station
Our dusty car
Cummins diesel powered mini.Up at 7am today and off to the first day of the the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Wow, where do I begin.
It was an relatively easy drive from Bognor Regis to Goodwood as the AA (NRMA equivalent) signs were very good and easy to follow from the main road.
The parking was in huge fields. Although they were grassed, at the end of the day all the vehicles were very dusty.
There were tractors driving around towing trailers picking people up from the car parks and taking them to the entry gate and back to their car at the end of the day.
The event has it's own FM radio channel and they included an ear mounted radio when we purchased the event program guide and this enabled us to listen to the commentary wherever you were. A great idea.
All the tickets had bar codes on them and there were blokes at the entrance with bar code scanners scanning each ticket which was obviously immediately compared to the DB of ticket numbers. Modern technology, isn't it marvelous? The bloke in front of us didn't get a beep (bad news) and was told the ticket was a fake and was taken to the office to explain where he got the ticket from. Looked O.K. to me. Fortunately our two tickets went beep, beep!
The place is enormous and I reckon we are going to need 3 days to see it all. Lord March who owns the estate, lives in a stately home, Goodwood House, in the middle of it all.
There was a Motor Show with most of the major brands showing their latest models in huge buildings. There are also masses of stalls selling everything you could want. Lyn was particularly keen on the stall selling hand made Italian leather handbags. The young well endowed female attendant said to me "feel free to feel them.....", I kid you not but I restrained myself and massaged the handbags to feel the texture of the leather!
There were continuous events on the bitumin hill climb with about 20 classes of vehicles both old and new and also motorcycles of various types and classes racing each other against the clock.
A short free tractor and trailer ride away on the estate there was also a rally track where vehicles such as WRX's and Evo's were competing although we did not get up there to see them on the first day. These vehicles did compete in their class on the hill climb though
We had roving grandstand tickets which allowed us to enter any of the covered grandstands where we watched events out of the sun as it was a warm day.
One of the stands was selling all the F1 racing suits down to 00. We could just see our little grandson Lincoln in a Michael Schumacher racing suit.
There was also a stall advertising the new Panasonic Lumix G2 Digital camera. They were giving them to people to use for 2 hours at the show with a 2gc SD card. After 2hours you took them back and they copied the photos from the SD card and put them (the photos) into a competition. If you were judged to have the best photo, you got a free camera. As a thank you for trying the camera they gave you the 2gb SD card. No obligation.
Stirling Moss, Jensen Button, Lewis Hamilton, Mark Webber and many others will be there on the weekend. Oh, and by the way the theme for this years event was celebrating 100 years of Alfa Romeo of which we have owned four.
Anyway by 4.30pm we were worn out and headed home. What a day. And 2 more to go.
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