Review: Goodwood Festival of Speed 2021

With so many (in-door) motorshows cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic the chance to attend the (mostly outdoors) 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed, held in England’s deep south last weekend (July 8th-11th) was a physical and metaphorical breath of fresh of air. Sizeable crowds were allowed back in a controlled manner and for this journalist it was a chance to see dozens of cars, friends and colleagues I hadn’t been allowed to see in person over the last 16 months of lockdowns and restrictions. Alongside a few significant global and UK reveals, plus rare 20th century classics, it was a welcome return and another classic Goodwood event. What follows are CDN’s potted highlights…

20s torpedo tails and 70s wedges via Cartier’s ‘Style et Luxe’

Cartier’s ‘Style et Luxe’ concours d’elegance has been a staple of the Festival of Speed since 1995 and every year sees a few dozen of the most interesting car designs ever created arranged on the lawn to the lower left of Goodwood’s famous hillclimb. Compared to the endless stream of racing cars trying to break the course record to its right, in an (often brute) display of function, Cartier’s static lawn is an oasis of calm where (usually elegant) form is paramount.

Judges for 2021’s event included former Apple designer Sir Jonathan Ive, product designer Marc Newson and McLaren F1 creator Gordon Murray, while diverse class categories included a quartet of 20s Hispano-Suizas to half a dozen 70s wedgy super cars. From the former group, the 1929 Hispano-Suiza H6B Galle Twin cockpit Boat-tail Torpedo Sport caught our eye the most with its sublime long-nosed proportions and chrome detailing, including its fabulous flying stork mascot, adopted from the emblem of the squadron of WWI French flying ace Georges Guynemer. From proud nose to torpedo tail, the H6B is the epitome of automotive elegance and the judges agreed, voting it class winner.

An even rarer marque with French connections – and its own dedicated class at 2021’s ‘Style et Luxe’ – was Amilcar. All the vehicles within this display were from the 1920s too and were all examples of ‘cyclecars’. Despite the name, no pedalling is required, but denote a type of motorised vehicle that sat between a motorcycle and a car and gained tax breaks in France for being lightweight (sub-350kg), small-engined (up to 1100cc) and seating no more than two people. The 1923 Amilcar CGS shown at 2021’s Goodwood was rarer still, on account of its unique torpedo tail, allowing room for a dickie seat behind its two main seats and the aesthetic effect is transformative. Alongside its electric blue paintwork, solid chrome wheels with skinny tyres and Pegasus mascot, the CGS stood out among a stellar cast.

If you want to reflect the trend of acute-angled cars in the 1970s in a category called Cutting Wedge Design it would be borderline neglect to avoid designs by Gandini and Giugiaro. Cartier’s classy curators didn’t make that mistake, locating a bright blue 1974 Lancia Stratos and resplendent orange 1975 Lamborghini Countach LP400 from Gandini’s back catalogue and a 1973 Maserati Bora and 1976 Lotus Esprit S1 from Giugiaro’s (very large) hall of fame. The other two spots reserved on the lawn for this category were the taken by Tom Tjaarda’s 1971 De Tomaso Pantera, penned at Ghia, and a 1974 Ferrari 365 Boxer designed by Leonardo Fioravanti at Pininfarina. Which wedge won the most judges’ hearts, you might ask? Almost inevitably, Gandini’s first-gen Countach LP400 took the best-in-class category gong, while his meticulously restored Stratos scooped Cartier’s overall prize for 2021.

Autonomous bubbles, electric pods and robotic dogs

Ideas are the focus of the Future Lab section of the festival and the 2021 edit included some big ones. For CDN it was the first time we were able to actually sit in the pollution-eating and autonomous-capable Airo concept car designed by London’s Heatherwick Studio for Chinese start-up IM (formed by SAIC and Alibaba). The corduroy-clad seats were as comfortable as those you might find in a well-loved domestic front room, but the dash design boasts a telescopic steering wheel and the EV’s exterior body work is unusually ribbed for (visual) pleasure. Originally shown at the Shanghai Auto Show in late April, the concept feels and is, very large at 5m long x 2.1m wide x 1.75m high and Heatherwick’s project leader Tom Glover conceded to CDN on the exhibition stand, that the production vehicle set to follow by circa 2024 may have to shrink down a bit for its initially Chinese city locale. (Interior Motives Summer 2021 digital magazine has the full interior design story.)

Considerably smaller but no less eye-catching and thought-provoking was Gordon Murray Design’s MOTIV pod concept. Originally launched in 2020 just before UK’s first lockdown, the electric single-seater quadricycle platform is flexible enough to be driven by a human or autonomously drive itself, swallow a wheelchair or carry commercial goods (up to 1100 litres in volume). With a cool composite gull-wing door design and aluminium chassis to keep the weight below 450kg, its 17.3kWh battery provides a 60-mile range and its 20kW motor is good for a 40mph top speed. City slick.

Kennels don’t normally feature at car shows, but then Boston Dynamics’ Spot the Dog at Goodwood’s Future Lab is no ordinary canine. The safety yellow-painted wonder is designed to work where humans might fear to tread and has already been used by the UK Atomic Energy Authority in Chernobyl to assist in the field of nuclear decommissioning. But on the appropriately-titled RACE stand (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments) when we were passing, the robotic Spot just seemed happy to act in a suitably dog-like way to show – in a relatable way – how clever, agile and lifelike, robots are rapidly becoming.

Finally, the 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed featured a fair few global and UK new car unveils too. BMW in particular went large, from the BMW 2 Series Coupe global reveal – with a mercifully restrained kidney grille in contrast to the BMW iX’s large stick-on one – plus the first physical sight of the stylishly-modern 42hp 80-mile range BMW CE 04 electric scooter too. Alongside the Electric Avenue stand across the track featuring exciting new production cars like the Kia KV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5, as well as the Polestar Precept concept, the quintessentially British event was a welcome addition to a still sparse global automotive calendar as the world attempts to wrestle its way out of the pandemic.