American icons to invade one of England’s oldest cricket pitches

The calm and serenity of the Goodwood Park cricket pitch, one of the oldest in England, are set to be shattered this year as the beautifully manicured green lawns are swathed in white as iconic vehicles from the Bonneville Speed Week come to the Goodwood Festival of Speed on 22 – 24 June.

Bonneville has often been described as the fastest place on earth, and expanding on the theme of the 2007 Festival of Speed, which is ‘Spark of Genius – Breaking Records, Pushing Boundaries’, the Goodwood cricket pitch will host a special display to represent the enterprising ethos of the Bonneville Speed Week in Utah, USA. Goodwood will recreate the distinctive Bonneville salt flats, and bring together a spectacular gathering of iconic machinery synonymous with the venue, the majority having never been seen before outside the USA.

Cars now confirmed to be on display range from the 1960 Challenger 1 – a stunning 400mph+ quad-engined beast – to The Blue Flame, which is a bullet-shaped rocket-powered vehicle that reached an astounding 630.478mph in 1970 and held the World Land Speed Record for 13 years. Joining them will be everything from early Ford Coupés and a clutch of famous speed record MGs, to the contemporary JCB DieselMax that broke records in 2006 and hopes to do so again later this year. In all there will be around a dozen of the most significant and famous Bonneville racers present, around half of which will be brought over from the USA specifically for the occasion.

One of these will be Bonneville legend Al Teague, who will be at the Festival for the first time with his famous Spirit of 76, for many years the world’s fastest piston-powered vehicle with a Bonneville terminal speed of 409mph. Equally streamlined, but rather smaller and more quirky, is the 1949 SoCal belly-tank, which achieved 198mph from a vehicle built around a modified P38 fighter plane fuel tank.

The overall ‘Spark of Genius’ theme for 2007 Festival of Speed will celebrate the glory of the individual racers and engineering visionaries who took risks and made sacrifices in their quest for victory. To honour these superb motoring milestones, the selection of machinery on the Goodwood hill will include a spectacular array of ground-breaking competition cars, which either redefined the technical possibilities of the age or allowed the driver to achieve the seemingly impossible.