Goodwood Festival of Speed 2011 roundup & HUGE photo gallery

Goodwood Festival of Speed 2011 with the E-Type sculpture outside the house

A look at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2011, celebrating 50 years of the E-Type, with a huge PHOTO gallery of the weekend.

It’s really quite hard to convey just how enjoyable the Goodwood Festival of Speed is to those who’ve never been.

John waxed lyrical over the weekend (someone has to do the weekend news) saying that the Goodwood FoS is “Disneyland for petrolheads, with the world’s greatest cars and greatest drivers wallowing in three days of high-octane worship at the alter of the internal combustion engine”

And he’s absolutely right, but there’s more to it than that. It it works because, despite the fame and ability of many of those who turn up to Goodwood every year, from Button to Moss and Evans to Martin, there is little in the way of them and us; it’s 180,000 diverse people drawn together by a common love of all things car.

This year’s theme was Jaguar, who are celebrating 50 years of the E-Type, and the massive and impressive sculpture outside the main house was a brilliant rendition of the E-Type in (Tata?) steel.

But perhaps the greatest part of Goodwood is the seemingly endless array of supercars and classic cars from both road and track. You can get up close and personal in the supercar paddock and watch everything from a Prius to a Kioenigsegg and a ’60s Lotus F1 to a current WRC car blasting up the hillclimb, past the house and away. Sometimes brilliantly driven, sometimes not. But a blast to watch.

Goodwood FoS is over for another year, but it seems 2011 was a record-breaker with over 180k visitors. If you didn’t make it you missed a treat, but whether you did or you didn’t we thought you’d enjoy a picture round-up of (almost) everything that went up the Goodwood hilclimb this weekend.

“Everything from classic road cars to the latest F1 machinery crowd in to this glorious corner of England, safe in the knowledge that they are among friends; no global-warmists here wagging a condemnatory finger.”