Goodwood FOS

I was there in 2012 and I literally couldn't even come close to explaining just how amazing an event the FOS is. If your into cars, its amazing but if your big into motorsport it's literally a sensory overload. Any dream car from any sort of motorsport back through generations that you've played on PlayStation or seen pics of, its probably going to be there. Straight off the bat, the more days you go for the better. To give you an idea we did 2 days and came back shattered but still missed loads. The Thursday is really only invited guests running super cars up the Hill which wasn't really for us so we gave it a skip and did Friday and Saturday. In terms of what to see though, you'd be flat out for the day. Obviously you've got the main hill climb and there's plenty of spots to watch the action without forking out more for seats in the stands. Getting close to the track by the house is very hard but once you head down towards the left hander there's great viewing there. The on track action is done in groups and they're often repeated through the day so you can come and go all the time. Once you've seen them up the hill, all the cars (and bikes!!) can be seen in their paddocks. The term open pit lanes doesn't come close to the access. Every car is just there for you to walk around without a rope in sight (the only exception our year was the modern F1 teams had GP style set ups but you could look in). Nick Mason's £20 Million Ferrari 250 was just the same as everything else. Theres about 4 or 5 paddocks for the various groupings whic keeps things together nicely.

Once you've had a fill of the hillclimb boys, there's free shuttles (trailer on the back of a tractor job) up into the woods for the proper stuff, the rally stage. You can walk but its a killer!! As again with Goodwood, expect every dream car all just sitting around in open paddocks for you to oogle at. The stage doesn't have many vantage points but you can get to a hairpin in the woods that's right near the end of the hillclimb.

Then, on top of all that, they also seem to have the equivalent of a large scale motorshow crammed into the free space. They have a big hall put up displaying all the brand new machinery like at a show and then the manufacturers and other companies have massive set ups then almost like full on dealerships. You'd be almost another day alone cruising about looking at these and some then have experience bits added on (Porsche had a Cayenne test drive, LandRover had off road passenger spins and Bowler had full tilt off road runs). Whats cool is that these stands have big names appearing all weekend so I know I was able to meet people like Thiery Neuville, Tiff Needell, Murray Walker and more and then you casually bump into stars aswell like Daniel Riccardo and Andre Lotterer cooly strolling about the place.

When we went over, we'd a big group and what we ended up doing was flying into London, renting cars and then booked a few apartments in Butlins!! It was a mad one but the rooms were seriously cheap, twas only about 40 mins drive to Goodwood and you'd have a bit of craic in Butlins sher. Our year was a complete scorcher, and even though we left ireland laden down with rain gear, Cork City was actually flooded when we flew out, it was the shorts we were in for the weekend.

definitely on my list of events to attend in some form or another at some stage because somehow I never managed to do so yet. I have been to most of the renowned shows in Europe (Essen, Maastricht, NEC...) and although it's always great to the see the diversity of exclusive and wonderful cars on display, the one thing that I always feel lacking is that these are almost always static displays. 
The one appeal of Goodwood is that you get a chance to see a lot of these rare beasts in action and for that reason alone it makes it an event that anyone that has a genuine passion for Classic Cars should attend at least once in a lifetime.