Doug Nye: Remembering Goodwood's original towering vantage points

I tried it tentatively. It worked fine. I felt I had got the angle right so that there was no backward moment of leverage on the ladder’s feet, with me upon it the darned thing just wouldn’t dare slip in any case. Wrong… I was up there, about ten feet in the air when the slide began.

Initially, it was like going down on a very smooth, progressively accelerating, angle-changing, lift. And then the top end of the ladder rails slipped clear of the overhanging soffit board upon which I had rested them, and 0-60mph in 1.2 seconds flat just wasn’t in it… 

I recall the swish of the airstream as I filed my vertical flight plan.  I just had time to tense my arms and heave my chest and ribs clear of the ladder, when WALLOP!!! We hit the deck, ladder first, your Goodwood Motorsport consultant historian (more or less horizontal) initially on all fours but instantaneously smeared all over on top of it.

My dear wife was a close-quarters observer of this remarkably noisy evolution. She reacted at her sympathetic best. “You bloody fool! Are you OK?”. Yes – in that order. Forty-six years of love and respect and obedience – on my part, of course – and it should come to this. 

Anyway – that’s the prelude to composing this week’s nostalgic thoughts upon our Goodwood Motor Circuit. I’m much recovered now after a couple of days of oohing and aahing, checking for any signs of sympathy. Not a sausage. 

OK – so I speedily concluded that that route is a waste of time. Just get over it – treat the leg cuts and grazes, sooth the bruises – gingerly flex the battered and aching joints – and watch the blustery gale refill those emptied gutters with more dead leaves… It’s just that time of year.

Now ladders play quite a role in Goodwood Motor Circuit activities. Ladders and steep wooden stairs. For years in the commentary tower at the Circuit we have worked with a lower-level comms point at the top of the initial flight of steep external stairs rising from the pit-block roof. And within that first-floor level box, there’s another vertical ladder, steel with narrow rungs, leading up through a square cut-out hatchway in the ceiling to a second-floor commentary point. In my experience this is absolutely the best vantage point on the entire site, offering a fully-glazed 360-degree view with line-of-sight to the racing surface interrupted only by the famous tree just in front of race control at the end of the pit-lane, and by the occasional airfield hangar or office-block roof.  

For years this was where Marcus Pye – and Ian Titchmarsh before him – commonly resided, commentating fourteen to the dozen from dawn until dusk, at the Revival Meetings. On the first floor level at the foot of that U-boat conning tower vertical ladder, would be Simon Taylor and often myself and the late Dave McKinney, or Chris Mason, feeding Simon with notes and observations for his TV overlay commentary.

That U-boat ladder has seen some fun and games, occasionally slips, smothered curses, once someone’s lunch box of sandwiches dropping down through the hatchway with a resounding crash – and a barely controlled expletive of surprise live on the PA or on the TV soundtrack. “And here comes – CRASH – Ooh $£@%!!! – aaah, Gary Pearson leading in the BRM…”. You know the kind of thing.

The old Goodwood pit block by its very nature, with its distinctive slender towers, required very steep stairs and ladders for simple access. In its racing heyday into the 1960s, the most important marshal’s posts around the circuit featured nicely-proportioned but still squat roofed-in towers as observers’ posts. The raised first-floor level in those was accessed by steep little stairs, and it was in the one out on the infield at Madgwick Corner that John Cooper took his son Mike to watch Bruce McLaren and a new young kid named Jackie Stewart test the latest Formula 3 Cooper-BMC during the winter of 1963-64. 

Mike recalled how the air within the marshal’s post developed a noticeable pong of charring paper, cloth or wood. Then they both realised that smoke was rising from where John had tapped-out the embers from his habitual tobacco pipe. That’s right the Cooper Car Co’s head had just set fire to one of his friend the 9th Duke’s timber marshal’s points. His reaction? “C’mon boy – we’re leaving!” – and like Delboy, Rodders and Grandad in the famous chandelier TV drama scene – that’s precisely what they did… leaving the circuit staff to fight an increasingly cheery blaze. Perhaps significantly – those quite attractive and distinctive marshals’ and observers’ towers did not survive long into the Motor Circuit’s years of slumber 1966-1997. Maybe we should see the budget to rebuild them?

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, our Phil Hill book series – ‘Inside Track’ – has just been published and is doing well (if interested see philhillbook.com). Using the 1,200 or so fabulous colour photographs that Phil had taken and kept during the heartland of his racing career – 1950-1962 – we set out to produce the finest World Champion Drivers’ book there has ever been – or that there is ever likely to be. From the extremely gratifying customer response that we have received, it seems the readers are happy that this has been achieved. Massive books of massive quality cost the earth to produce, leading us to adopt Sussex-resident Sir Henry Royce’s famous quote as a mantra “The quality will remain long after the price has been forgotten”…

Now Phil as America’s first World Champion Driver – for Ferrari in 1961 – had a career-long link with Goodwood in that it was here on Easter Monday 1950 that the young Californian actually set eyes upon a Grand Prix car for the very first time. At that stage, he recalled, “The limit of my ambition was, one day, to become race mechanic to a great racing driver…”. Twelve years later he was Champion of the World.

He took some photographs that day – in that weekend off from his studies as a visiting apprentice mechanic on a residential training course with Jaguar Cars, Rolls-Royce, MG Cars and SU Carburettors. And one of his photos shows the steep stairs – my obsession this week – at the back of the contemporary Goodwood race control building. And coming down those stairs in a long overcoat and with his trademark trilby hat is Freddie Richmond himself, the 9^th Duke of Richmond & Gordon. Phil had been immersing himself in the British motor racing scene and in pre-war racing history, from the age of about ten in 1937. He subscribed to the British weekly magazines ‘The Motor’ and ‘The Autocar’, and he was an avid reader of the Chula/Bira motor racing books, of the MG racing sagas written by author Barré Lyndon, and of books by Land Speed Record breakers Malcolm Campbell, George Eyston and Sir Henry Segrave.

He had followed all of that, devoured their words avidly and committed them to memory. Phil was a ‘car guy’ from cradle to grave, and he could never quite understand why so many racing rivals lacked a similar grounding in the sport, and what had gone before them. This was one of the factors that made this highly-intelligent, multi-faceted and thoughtful man such a delightful friend – and there in his photo archive we found this apparently random photo – but it showed he knew exactly whose photograph he was taking that landmark day.

The young Californian kid was photographing ex-racing driver, former Brooklands race winner, creator of the Goodwood Motor Circuit – Freddie Richmond – no less, and he knew it.

For this week – when steep steps and ladders are very much in my mind (while also being so deeply imprinted upon my legs and ribs) – I just felt I had to dig out Phil’s photo – plus some others – and share them with friends…

Photography courtesy of The Phil Hill Family Archive