KINGS OF THE HILL
This year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed is a celebration of those drivers and teams that saw success across the racing disciplines. Expect to be impressed, says Damien Smith
Sir Stirling Moss’ Mercedes
300SLR ‘722’ from the 1955 Mille Miglia will be in attendance.
DAIMLER AG
THERE’S TALK THAT WE’RE about to experience the euphoria of a second ‘Roaring ’20s’ as we come blinking back into the post-pandemic light. For ‘our world’, the timing of the brakes being released from restrictions couldn’t be better: the Goodwood Festival of Speed, back after a painful year away, should return on July 8-11 and could be the perfect occasion to embrace some semblance of normality – at an event that has a history of transporting us to a state that is anything but. Boy, it’ll be good to be back in the Duke of Richmond’s garden.
REMEMBERING
SIR STIRLING MOSS
Speaking of boys, the FoS will be the first public occasion where motor sport can properly celebrate the wonderful life of The Boy, Sir Stirling Moss, in the wake of his death last year on April 12 at the age of 90. The enforced delay will likely only heighten the emotion as we finally get to pay our respects and you won’t be surprised to read that the Duke and his team are planning to pull out the stops for England’s greatest racing hero.
The jewel in the celebration at FoS will be a rare appearance from 300SLR ‘722’, the car in which Stirling and Motor Sport’s continental correspondent Denis Jenkinson conquered the Mille Miglia in 1955. Mercedes-Benz rarely allows the treasure out of its Stuttgart museum, but it’s absolutely right and fitting that the car should journey to Goodwood once more this year to sit in state on resplendent static display – along with Jenks’ famous ‘bog roll’ navigational box, naturally. It might draw the odd passer-by.