Subaru and Ford Are Unlikely Rivals at Goodwood Free-for-All

Subaru’s two-pronged attack on the driveway of Goodwood House at the 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed came to a bittersweet end on Sunday. A second place for rookie Goodwooder Scott Speed in the matte-black Project Midnight WRX saved the day after a disappointing DNF for event veteran Travis Pastrana, who ended an otherwise ripping run in the bonkers, wings-flapping Huckster wagon by eating a haybale just over half way up the course in rural southern England.

To add to the indignity, Subaru’s snapping, snarling flame-spitters were bested by a box of batteries and computer chips known as the Ford SuperVan, a 1400-hp (maybe, rumors say it’s more like 2000) all-electric and carbon-fiber creation that sounds like a dentist’s drill and looks like a plumber’s van from Planet 10.

As with most of the cars at Goodwood, the SuperVan is a repurposed racer from elsewhere, based on the electric F-150 with which Ford won this year’s Pike’s Peak hill climb in Colorado (England being more of a van land, the SuperVan was shaped to evoke the company’s locally popular Transit). Driver Romain Dumas flashed across the line in 43.98 seconds, just over two seconds quicker than Speed’s time, joining a roster of hyperelectrics that are now routinely crushing the petro-combusters at the event. 

But that’s the way it goes at Goodwood, which stands apart as a totally unrestricted free-for-all in a professional racing world that is otherwise governed by dense rule books full of hairsplitting regulations. The annual hill climb up the driveway of the 12,100-acre Goodwood estate in southern England has no real rules, no technical stewards, no scales or measuring tapes. There are notional classes, and there is reputed to be a very gentlemanly handshake agreement to “be reasonable” under pain of penalty that the Duke won’t invite you back, but otherwise it’s run-what-ya-brung, from 120-year old steam cars to modern F1 racers, and may the quickest vehicle up the hill win.

Which seems appropriate for an event that is only partly a serious motorsports competition. Mainly it’s a publicity showboat for automakers and racing teams and a nostalgia trip for collectors and enthusiasts. Modern F1 cars such as the dazzling array of Red Bulls past and present that the team brought this year should theoretically be fastest, but those mostly did burnouts and smoky doughnuts to the delight of the crowd, Red Bull perhaps figuring the extra screen time of horsing around for the cameras was worth more than any laurels from winning. 

And as long as everyone is having fun, including the 200,000 or so who pay around $120 to $340 to enter the four-day event, why muck it up with a lot of rules?

“It is very strange,” said Yannis Loison, technical director of Vermont SportsCar, which Subaru Motorsports USA hires to build stunt cars like the Huckster and gymkhana machines such as the 2020 Airslayer and this year’s pavement-eating Project Midnight. With a background in WRC Rallycross, a highly regulated and internationally contested form of racing that is a mashup of traditional rallying and autocross, Loison has found Goodwood to be both refreshing and a bit daunting. “Normally we take the rules and regulations and work backwards to figure out what we can do to succeed, but we don’t have those here.” 

Long a participant in rallying, Subaru first invaded the fiefdom of Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond and the lord and master of Goodwood, a few years ago when the Festival added a dirt track through a forest suitable for rally cars both vintage and modern. But in 2022 Subaru became serious about the paved hill climb (and also broke the internet) with the Huckster, a 1983 Subaru GL wagon monstrafied with a carbon body, movable spoilers and wings that make it look under braking like a ladybug in flight, and an 862-hp turbo flat four. Topping it off was a historic red, white, and blue paint scheme that recalled Subaru’s sponsorship of the US Olympic ski team in the 1980s.

Perennial fan favorite Travis Pastrana, a rally artist and celebrated motorcycle aerialist, finished fourth that year. The next, he finished second against a top-ten lineup mostly consisting of mega-dollar exotics, cementing scrappy Subaru’s place at a very high-brow table.

This year, Scott Speed, a steely eyed veteran of F1, Indycar, NASCAR, and Formula E, jointed Subaru’s assault on Goodwood in the Project Midnight. It’s an evolution of the WRX STi-based Airslayer with a custom CNC-milled suspension tuned for asphalt, a body that mixes carbon-fiber panels with seam-welded stock stampings, and a 680-hp flat-four hand built from bespoke components and inflated with 58 psi of boost. Behind the rearward-relocated flat-four, a ZF six-speed sequential-shift trans sends power to the four wheels with a pronounced rear torque bias to reduce understeer and help turn the roughly 2500-lb car.

Despite the 50-plus color schemes considered for the car, Subaru Motorsports USA, which is under the direction of the company’s Camden, New Jersey-based communications department, picked jet black, making Project Midnight look like Batman’s WRX. Blue and gold might have been more evocative of Subaru’s history, but let’s not forget that that celebrated 1990s rally color scheme came from sponsorship by British American Tobacco, makers of the 555 brand of cigarettes.

Despite the fairly straightforward look of the course and the short runs of less than a minute, the speeds are high, with the faster cars topping 130 mph. The Duke’s driveway is quite challenging, said Speed. “It’s so narrow and the haybales are so high, you can’t see anything. Because you can’t see through the corner, you can’t predict the shape of the corner until you’re in it.”

To prepare, the data-obsessed Speed watched a lot of in-car videos from Pastrana and played simulations. He also mounted GoPro cameras that look down the sides of the car so he could see after each run how close he was cutting it to the haybales. He figured the car was good for 45-second runs, maybe even better, but on the final pass he got a little loose in one spot and finished with a 46.07.

“I’m proud of the effort from everybody. I really feel like the team did their best job this week,” he said. “And what a crazy experience, I can’t emphasize enough how much this hill—or track—is such a special place. It’s one of the most unique things I’ve ever driven.”

For his part, Pastrana was philosophical about his concussive redesign of the Huckster against the haybales, ending a blistering, full-send run in which he had set the event’s best times in the course’s first two sectors. “We tried to get everything we could out of the car this weekend. When I hit the braking point, I slid a little bit, I should have backed it in and drifted (the corner),” he said. “Excuses aside, it was a good time, the crowd was awesome and, hopefully, we’ll come back and do it again next year.”

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