The summer Season
Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping quite like live, fast-paced action and the summer Season enjoys the finest athletic, equine and motor-driven moments of elation. Ben Lerwill tells us why awe-inspiring speed adds glamour and draws the crowds
THE first step had been asking Nick the shepherd to round up his f lock.
It was the summer of 1993 and the Earl of March was following a longheld dream of bringing motorsport back to his Goodwood estate in West Sussex. Tents had been erected, bales had been laid along the track and a makeshift gantry had been constructed. The night before the gates opened, the Earl himself could be found painting a freshly built bridge in the drizzle. But here was the question: would anyone come?
The British Automobile Racing Club had predicted a crowd of perhaps 2,000 to what would be the inaugural Goodwood Festival of Speed. By the end of the weekend, 25,000 people had poured into the estate, among them George Harrison at the wheel of a Light Car Company Rocket. A decade later, in June
2003, with the festival now an annual fixture in the calendar, the ticketed attendance had swelled to 158,000. They say sex sells—here was the ev idence that speed does the same.
In this respect, the festival was no outlier. The summer social Season has always been fond of thronged gatherings at which velocity means victory. Think of Royal Ascot, where the fleetest horses gallop at speeds approaching 50mph—can’t you hear the drum-roll thundering of those hooves?— or Henley Royal Regatta, where straining muscles propel eight-oared racing shells through the water with almost supernatural swiftness.
‘Speed is relative,’ claimed the legendary Italian-American racing driver Mario Andretti, who drove competitively for three decades and famously lapped the entire field at the Japanese Formula One Grand Prix in 1976.
‘You have to live it. You can’t just jump into it. You have to live it all the time.’
Although relatively few of us have experienced the G-force intensity of hurtling around a Grand Prix circuit, we all know the thrill of witnessing fast-paced sporting drama. It was about 2,900 years ago, in Book 23 of the Iliad, that Homer first described the crowds at a chariot race (spoiler: Diomedes and his high-stepping stallions take first place ‘in a cloud of dust’) and spectators in the inter vening millennia have routinely shown the same appetite for watching action unfold at breakneck speed.
Even events such as Wimbledon and the Lord’s Test—both partly synonymous with sedate, strawberries-and-cream summer days—reach their fiercest and fullest expression through missile-like cross-court winners or the 90mph shattering of stumps. The great Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson, England pace bowler of the 1950s and tormentor of many
