The 10 Best Things We Saw at the 2017 Goodwood Festival of Speed

If this tall, oddly proportioned red jalopy looks familiar, it’s because you’ve likely seen it on Road & Track. Its nickname is the Beast of Turin, and it is a 106-year-old Fiat S76 with a 28.5-liter four-cylinder engine.

The aptly named Fiat was originally conceived to attempt a land-speed record, which it did in 1911 with a 116-mph flying mile run. (It also set an unofficial top speed record at an insane 135 mph.) These days, the Beast of Turin is fast becoming a staple at Goodwood, where its unmistakable exhaust blat cuts across Lord March’s serene estate like cannon fire. Speaking of fire, this fan favorite spits the stuff from its open headers with practically each cylinder’s combustion cycle and physically shakes its body panels at speed.

In 1962, Colin Chapman vaulted his Lotus racecars to technology’s bleeding edge with the unibody 25. The stiff, lightweight body also was attractively low and sleek; functionally, this translated to a nice wide stance and a minimal frontal area for better aerodynamics. What truly distinguishes it is that the monocoque design perseveres today not only in road cars, but in its Formula 1 descendants.

After just missing the title in 1962, the 25 would go on to win seven of 10 Grands Prix in 1963, its second season in action, with Jim Clark at the wheel. Its performance comfortably earned Mr. Clark the ’63 world title.

Each year, Goodwood features certain marques or celebrates significant automotive milestones with special vehicle collections. This year featured not only a batch of incredible Martini-liveried race cars (see the Lancia Delta S4 rally car later in this roundup), but a host of Ferraris honoring the brand’s 70th birthday. Of course, we’d have to pick at least one Ferrari as a 2017 favorite, and we landed on the company’s first sports car, the 125S.

Our favorite aspect of older Ferraris are their microscopic V-12 engines, and the 125S has a particularly tiny one: a 1.5-liter. That’s right, this 12-cylinder engine’s displacement is about the same as an average modern subcompact’s four-cylinder. So, too, is its power output of 118 horsepower. Shortly after its debut, the 125S went racing, winning its second race, the Grand Prix of Rome.

As Goodwood’s other featured breed, cars dressed in Martini Racing’s red, white, and blue livery were thick on the ground at Lord March’s estate. We walked right by the iconic racing Porsches and even a Martini-liveried Lotus 79 F1 car to this Delta S4 Group B rally car. Of the numerous Group B cars on display, the S4 is easily the most significant: Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto perished in one. Their deaths would later fuel the FIA’s push to retire the class on the grounds it was too dangerous.

(Note: These photos were taken at an earlier, pre-Goodwood event.)

Taking a look at this Lancia’s specs, it isn’t difficult to see where Group B gleaned its wild image. The roughly 2000-pound rally car is powered by a mid-mounted, turbocharged and supercharged 1.8-liter four-cylinder capable of spitting out almost 500 horsepower. Twincharging, as the Lancia’s dual forced induction setup is known, was cutting-edge in the mid-‘80s. Today, it can be seen on relatively pedestrian vehicles including some late-model Volkswagens in Europe and top-of-the-line Volvos.

We would have paid money to watch this Fiat 500 Zanzara Zagato take a (long, leisurely) run up Goodwood’s hill-climb. Instead, the funky, 500-based convertible, er, thing, sat amongst a gaggle of Cinquecentos on the nearby lawn of the Cartier Style et Luxe display. The 500s had gathered in celebration of the nameplate’s 60th anniversary, and were charmingly out of place in the Cartier-sponsored environs also playing host to classic Ferraris, Maseratis, McLarens, and more.

As you might have suspected, the Zanzara is a one-off, although Zagato had plans to market and sell it in small numbers. Not pictured here is the Zanzara’s demi roof, but we think it’s more impressive without it, like a bug-eyed Lancia Stratos. Consider the little wedge-shaped creation on the cutting edge of design, too, given how it came out in 1969, just ahead of the wedge craze of the ‘70s.

Our office desks are littered with Lego kits, and we’re adults (at last measure). Many of us played with the plastic bricks as kids and never lost the bug, all the more reason why the full-size 720S McLaren had built out of Legos at the Festival is so cool.

Making the 1:1-scale 720S even better was that it arrived at Goodwood mostly assembled, and the automaker left final construction to festivalgoers. Anyone willing to wait in a line (which was short when we visited) would be handed a brick and told generally where to place it. Fun.

In the early 1950s, Cummins decided to take advantage of the Indianapolis 500 rulebook allowance for diesel engines with displacements of up to 6.6 liters and build an oil-burning racer, mostly as a marketing ploy. This Kurtis Kraft Diesel Special was the powerful result.

The 1952 Indy 500 wasn’t Cummins’s first rodeo. The company had fielded a diesel in the 1931 500. That car was entered as a special engineering vehicle, according to Cummins, as no rules yet existed pertaining to diesels. It didn’t win that year, but didn’t need to: The car ran all 500 miles nonstop, a first, and did so using just $1.40 of fuel—just as the Great Depression was hitting its stride. Cummins’s image was further bolstered in ’52, when this 380-hp, inline-six–powered Kurtis Kraft creation scored pole position, the only diesel-powered car ever to do so at the Brickyard. The car proved competitive until rubber tire bits kicked up from the racetrack’s surface clogged its turbocharger inlet, retiring it from the race after 70 laps.

What better car to feature in this Goodwood roundup than a classic, successful hill-climb car? This Hepworth-Ferguson won the British Hillclimb Championship in 1969 and 1971, and even qualified for the timed hill-climb shootout on Goodwood’s last day.

The Hepworth might look like an old Formula 5000 car, but it’s a different animal entirely. An Oldsmobile V-8 engine (far from stock, we should point out, and later replaced by a 5.0-liter Chevrolet V-8) sends power to all four wheels via a Ferguson all-wheel-drive system.

No longer a factory participant in the World Rally Championship, Subaru has busied itself the past few years with record attempts using its WRX STI. It began with a run at the brutal and lethal Isle of Man TT time trial, a curious choice given the event’s close association with motorcycles. (Little-known fact: The TT started out as an automotive race before transitioning solely to bikes.) In any case, Subaru showed up with rally ace Mark Higgins and a stock STI in 2011 and set a record lap time for a four-wheeled vehicle. Then last year, Subaru hit the TT with Higgins and a Prodrive-prepped STI and obliterated its own record.

The record-setting car was shown at last year’s FoS and made a few spirited runs up the hill-climb course. This year, Subaru brought the car back with the hope of taking the weekend’s quickest time up the hill.