84 CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK | MAY 2019
ou’ve probably been to this guy’s house. Over
the past 25 years, four million tickets have
been sold for the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Allowing for those who come every year, at
least half a million people, including most of
CAR’s readership, have wandered through the
parkland around Goodwood House, home of
the Duke of Richmond.
If that’s your only experience of this place,
you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a permanent motorsport theme
park, so vast and varied are its structures and entertainments. For the three
weeks it takes to construct, the Festival is the world’s largest greenfield
construction site, and once completed it draws enough electricity to power
nearby Chichester. The house itself is dwarfed by it all, flanked by colossal
video screens and towered over by one of Gerry Judah’s 100-tonne, 150-
foot, am-I-actually-seeing-that automotive aerial sculptures.
But visit at any other time and there’s weirdly little evidence that the
Festival happens at all. I’ve come to have coffee with the Duke on a glorious
February day, using his drive for what it was actually intended for, which is
to get to the House past sheep quietly grazing, rather than tearing up in a
modern F1 car or an aero-engined Edwardian racer.
I park on the gravel carriage circle behind the Duke’s Land Rover V8
Defender and his Porsche 911 GT2 RS. They’ve been left there for us
to drive later: his cars are usually kept well out of sight. Before I go in I
wander across the lawn to see if I can spot where that colossal sculpture is
anchored each year. I find it: a tiny hatch maybe 70cm square and
carefully turfed over. It’s the only visual reassurance that the Festival isn’t
just the fevered dream of millions of motorsport fans.
The front door is opened by the steward (you don’t need to knock) and
I’m shown through the grand entrance hall and up a sweeping staircase tothe working part of the house, through an antechamber occupied by the
Duke’s three personal assistants and into his private office.
Tony Mountford, aka Monty, has been the Duke’s butler for 12 years after
29 years in the navy, 19 of which were on subs. He is preparing tea (Harvey
Nichols’ Earl Grey with lemon) for the boss and coffee (from Edgcumbes of
nearby Arundel, watch-keeper’s strength) for me. The pots are silver and
the cups are bone china; did you honestly think we’d go to Starbucks?
Before His Grace joins us I have a nose around his extraordinary
Duke-cave. A quarter-century of hosting the greatest cars and drivers in
motorsport makes for good memorabilia. There’s a gigantic Betty Boop
cardboard standee, one of Dick Petty’s feathered stetsons in a glass case,
countless steering wheels, helmets and awards, and a large glass desk that
has been completely occupied by model cars. I suggest to Monty that it
must be a nightmare to dust. ‘A lady comes in once a week,’ he confides. ‘She
knows to put it all back in exactly the same place. He’d notice otherwise.’
‘I was going to clear it all out when we last redecorated,’ says the Duke
almost apologetically when he arrives. ‘But then they put it all back in again
before I could stop them.’
Monty pours the first cups, and leaves us to it. Since 1993 and the first
Festival his boss has been the nation’s motorsport fairy godfather. He was
then plain Lord March: he inherited the dukedom on the death of his
father in 2017. That first Festival was pleasingly amateurish: Charles was
up a ladder painting the bridge over the drive as the first cars arrived.
‘We hoped for 2000 people, and the BARC [British Automobile Racing
Club] said we’d be lucky to get that. In the end I think we had 20,000 people
that first year. But we’ll never really know because most of them broke in.’
The Festival was joined by the Revival in 1998 and the Members’ Meeting
in 2014. Together they have become as central to motorsport culture as the
great races and rallies they celebrate. The event sells out every year, space
limiting numbers to 200,000.
The Festival in particular is now central to the British car industry too.
Cars move and make noise, so who wants to see them static and roped-off
in an over-heated and over-lit exhibition hall? When Porsche launched the
911 GT2 RS during the Festival of Speed in 2017, the first that the assembled
global media saw of it was when Mark Webber ripped past them in one, ⊲The man, The car, The coffeey‘I don’t do a bloody thing,’says the Duke. ‘I just sit hereand drink lots of cups of tea.’This is untrueTea for the Duke, coffee for CAR. Don’t worry, the kitchen coped▲ ▲ ▲
The Duke of
Richmond
In full, Charles Gordon-
Lennox, 11th Duke of
Richmond, 11th Duke
of Lennox, 11th Duke of
Aubigny, 6th Duke of
Gordon. Previously Earl
of March.Land Rover
Defender Works V8
Number one of 150
made, built last year to
celebrate Land Rover’s
70th anniversary. The
5.0-litre V8 makes
400bhp; 0-60mph in
5.6sec.Coffee by Monty
From Edgcumbes of
Arundel, prepared
by Monty the butler
and served with
Goodwood Home
Farm milk. Unlike CAR,
His Grace doesn’t take
coffee before lunch.Cof fee with CAR