Right now I feel like Daad Mohammed; a sixty year old man with 84 children and 4 nagging wives who he has sex with at least 10 times a day. No I’m not feeling lucky, I feel bloody knackered!
In my last blog entry I mentioned that the next day I was visiting the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I also said that I would make sure I wore plenty of sun lotion because I was fed up with hot weather and I would burn to crisp. So guess what I didn’t do? I also wore sunglasses pretty much the whole day, so since Thursday evening I’ve looked like a negative photo of a Raccoon.
Knowing that the day would quickly get warm, busy and a lot of the fun stuff would be in the morning, myself and my colleagues agreed to meet up at 7am and aim to get to Goodwood for 9am. This meant waking up at 5:45am (the thought still makes me wince), calling my colleague Ed to ensure he was awake, and then trying very hard not to wake up the rest of the family as I got showered and dressed. I also volunteered to be the driver, firstly because my car is the most spacious, but mostly because my car was guaranteed to actually get us there!!
The journey, despite taking closer to three hours than two, was great fun. We saw a Maserati Quattroporte, argued over whether it was a good car or not, but then to our great delight we drove past a 2010-plate Chevrolet Matiz. A vehicle which now comes with air-conditioning as standard (not even my Astra SRI came with air-conditioning as standard) and to our amazement was doing over 80mph on the motorway. In fact it took me such a long time to pass it that my colleague Ben had enough time to whip out his camera and take a photo of this splendid vehicle, and the incredible man behind the wheel. We even spilled the Haribo Tangfastics; that’s dedication.
After a few wrong turns, a cigarette break for Ed and Gareth and Ben taking over from the SatNav, we arrived at the Goodwood car park. I say car park, it was a field with a lot of teenagers in high-visibility jackets pointing their arms in the obvious direction to take. Did they really think I would not follow the rest of the cars, take a sharp right and drive to the other end of the field? We parked the vehicle, and then proceeded to take nearly half an hour to reach the festival site. Not because it was a large distance, but actually because we stopped to photograph and discuss all the nice vehicles in the car park. We found Aston Martins, we found special edition vehicles from Porsche, we found FIVE Chevrolet Corvettes, and a numerous number of Ferraris.
Once inside the festival site we walked through the ‘moving motorshow’, essentially a warehouse with cars from manufacturers parked on either side. These were being taken out onto the track by people with enough money to possibly by one (i.e. not us), but it did mean we could drool and orgasm over the various engines. It was a good job we arrived when we did. A few hours later some berk crashed the Honda Civic Type-R into two Jaguars. Being a Jaguar man, if I had been there I would have pulled him from the wreckage and called him a twat.
I wasn’t entirely sure what Ed was looking for more; good cars or potential women. However by stroke of luck the manufacturers with hot cars had hired hot women to stand around the vehicles; Alfa Romeo did particularly well at this. Jaguar did not; their staff were all men in their later years. You can take a guess at which stand we were at longer. We also visited the stands which were giving out freebies; Nissan were handing out brochures for the GT-R, Audi were handing out bags, and we even popped into ‘Miltek Exhausts’ because I got yet another bag.
I was terribly put off by the cost of everything though. Lunch was a cider (£4), a bottle of water (£2!!!!) to take with me in my Miltek bag, and prawns and chips (£4+) in a little cardboard tray. This wasn’t posh eating; the plastic chairs we were sat on had less rigidity than the cardboard my prawns were in. We also found trade stalls, and this was where I could have EASILY spent a few thousand pounds. 1:18 size replica models in such amazing detail and quality; they were £100+ each. There was also a stall selling pewter and bronze models. Two particular models stood out to me; a two foot bronze replica of the ‘leaping jaguar’ featured on the bonnets of older Jaguar models, and a three foot pewter model of Concorde. Both of these models retailed for more than £1500 each, and sadly it will be many years before I could justify spending that much money on a model (although both of those models would have looked fantastic in my newly decorated bedroom).
We continued wandering around the event, visiting each manufacturer and taking more photos. We also stopped to rest on some steps by the side of the long straight of the track, and watched the vehicles go past. Now this was more frustrating than a joy; so many people refused to put their foot down and enjoy the car. Sure enough its not their car, but it’s a supercar all the same which you’re test driving, you’re in front of a crowd, ON A RACE TRACK, just give it the bloody beans. But no, we saw so many vehicles go past where they were running on tick-over. Only a small number of vehicles impressed me; the AMG V8 Mercedes, the V10 Audi R8, and the Morgan. Hand on heart, the engine in the Morgan is the nicest sounding vehicle I have ever heard. It was a sound which made me open my mouth and breathe out “ohhhhmyyyyygodddd”, and send a shiver down my spine.
By this point we had mutually agreed we’d seen everything there was to see. We briefly went over to the other side of the race track to view some of the Formula One vehicles, but then quickly came back again. Formula One cars don’t do anything for me, in fact they are to cars what the Queen is to women. Powerful, amazing, and interesting, but doesn’t turn me on. We made our way back to the car park, stopping off via the Mercedes-Benz show stand to mess around with some AMG models, and have a catch up with two friends I work with who were at the festival to be a fountain of knowledge on all things Mercedes-Benz. I suspect they were in it for the women and free luxury hotel stays.
The journey back was not quite as fun as the journey there, although this wasn’t a surprise. The SatNav took us a different route, and we were all so tired I doubt any of us had the energy to think of conversation. In fact the most fun came when we got stuck in a traffic jam on the M25, and Ed cured his boredom by trying to get direct eye contact with as many women as possible. This backfired when he encountered a girl with a murderer as a boyfriend, and Ben politely reminded him that we were in my 3-door Astra. Hypothetically by the time the murderer had dragged Ed out of the window, Ben push the passenger chair forward, open the door and climb out, Ed would be beyond saving. Ed quickly stopped this game.
We did not get home until gone 7pm, and I immediately coated myself in moisturiser. I collapsed into my computer chair and uploaded photos, but went to bed shortly afterwards. However I did not sleep, it’s so painful to lay in a bed with bad sunburn. Same went for Friday night too. Followed by DIY with my dad today (I shall save this for another blog).
S this is why I feel like Daad Mohammed today. Bring me my bed.
