Off to the 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed. It's a motor show held annually at the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, spread across four days, with Thursday as a preview day. I went on Friday, the first full day of the event, and it continues over the weekend. Some people camp out for the duration but I just went for one day. I bought my tickets six weeks ago, but even then Saturday and Sunday had sold out, so you have to book early.
Why did I go? Gran Turismo 6, that's why.
One of the most entertaining events in that game is the Goodwood Hillclimb, a time trial that seems simple at first but has hidden depths. It takes less than a minute to complete, but in practice most of my attempts meet with disaster in the first ten seconds.
One of the easiest ways to win races in Gran Turismo is to use the trackside barriers as speed brakes, but the opening part of the Hillclimb doesn't have barriers, so if you leave the track you just slide off into the grass. Furthermore you can't bump into other cars to slow yourself down because there are no other cars. It's just you versus time, just like life itself. You versus time.
There are no shortcuts, no cheats, no way of gaming the game. You have to bite the bullet and learn how to precisely modulate the throttle, the brake, and the steering, just as the designers intended. If only for that one event you can't hide. You can't rely on out-horsepowering the other cars. You can't rely on the AI slowing down in the last two laps. You have to actually drive the car.
The Hillclimb is seared into my mind mainly for the final run, where you have to guide a prototype Red Bull X2010 around the course. In theory a great car, with excellent acceleration and lots of downforce, but the Hillclimb is very narrow, and without precise control you tend to, yes, slide off into the grass. Perhaps with throttle pedals and a steering wheel clamped to a very solid oak desk it's easier, but alas I only have a PlayStation control pad.
The Festival of Speed has several events beyond the Hillclimb - for a small sum you can be drifted around in a Jaguar.
How does the Hillclimb go? It starts with a short straight. Sadly I couldn't get any shots of the opening straight because in 2019 it was grandstand-only. It would have been impossible in any case because even on Friday morning during the very first run Goodwood was very crowded. It's Britain's only large-scale supercar festival with track action, and it has such a high profile that people come from all around the world to see it. Instead I wandered around the ground a lot. There's a rally stage up in the forest at the top of the hill.
The marshals are volunteers. They do a six-hour shift each day in exchange for free run of the event off-shift. In practice I doubt that they have much spare time - the event runs from 08:30-18:00, leaving very little time to get changed, clock out etc - so presumably they do it for fun and go home exhausted.
Safety-wise the event has had, as far as I can tell, only three deaths. During the first Festival of Speed in 1993 a motorcyclist was killed in a crash just beyond the finish line, and in 2000 a car went off the track, killing the driver and a marshal.
Beyond that most of the Hillclimb runs aren't driven in anger - the older cars are too valuable to wreck - and the competitive entrants are top professionals in modern cars, so my hunch is that the biggest risk is from freak events. Loose bits of airborne metal, heat exhaustion, heart attacks etc.
This chap's Audi has seen better days.
Gran Turismo is a faded giant, but I imagine that lots of people like myself still remember the games. I have to admit that when I was younger I associated hillclimbs with Morgan three-wheelers and men who wear tweed - many decades have passed since ordinary cars couldn't go up a 4.9% gradient - but Gran Turismo made the event hip again.
But where was I? After the opening straight there are two right-handers, then an extremely shallow right that takes you in front of the spectators, then a sharper left-right with a bump. Then you brake for a left turn, the famous Molecomb corner. Braking for the corner is difficult because you have to start braking at the end of the bumpy left-right.
If you don't brake, you slide off into bales of hay. On a photographic level Molecomb isn't that great. It's a tidy corner, not a slidey corner. Unless the driver is pushing hard enough to upset the car, or your reactions are good enough to catch the car in the brief piece of track just before the turn, you'll end up with shots of cars driving towards the camera as if they were standing still.
Next is a short uphill straight, shown here with some cars coming down after their run:
At the top is an awkward right-left. Awkward for a number of reasons. It's in the shade, so on a sunny day the driver can't see it. The left wall is stone, and the turn is very tight, so I imagine more than one wing mirror has ended up clattering down the track, adrift from its car. In Gran Turismo 6 it's also awkward because the gradient slows the car a little bit, so if you brake as you would on the flat you lose more speed than you might want.
Here are a couple of shots of that bend from GT6, because photographing it in real life is impossible without a press pass (and in this case a camera mounted in a second car):
After the shaded right-left there's a shallow right, and at the top of that there's another shaded turn, this time a relatively gentle right that's still dangerous because you're going faster. Out of the shade you come to a straight:
Which ends with a shaded left turn, which is relatively shallow but again dangerous because you're picking up speed for the final straight, where you hope beyond hope that one last burst of speed will compensate for the wide turns, the off-track excursions, the poor braking, late cornering, wall collisions, the waste, the lack of urgency, the things you didn't say, the chances you didn't take, the money you wasted, the shouting, and yet what could you have done differently? You were born to a world that didn't need you, constrained throughout your life by a lack of resources, just like everybody else, and like billions of others who are alive today and billions more who are dead you had no chance. The best you can hope for now is to drown it all out with alcohol and die in your sleep.
But perhaps one last burst of speed can make amends. One last burst of speed. And yet so many of my runs in Gran Turismo ended with disaster. I pushed too hard on the final straight and went wide, brushing into the right wall, so I overcompensated and smacked into the left wall with enough force to disqualify me from the run.
Gran Turismo 6 again
That's enough about the Hillclimb. It's distressing. I also went to test out my 300mm f/4 IS. Having now been there in person my tip is that if you have an APS-C camera, a 70-200mm f/2.8 is ideal for Goodwood, and with a full-frame camera a 100-400mm lens is similarly terrific, bearing in mind that with action photography of high-speed cars it's a good idea to shoot with lots of space around the subject and compose the image by cropping later on. Sigma makes a 120-300mm f/2.8 that would be ideal if you can hold it all day.
What of the rest of Goodwood? There was a dedicated drifting arena, which was packed four-deep with people holding mobile phones above their heads. Nothing wrong with that. There were a number of trade stalls, including a small "Mini village" with a hairdresser and a photo studio. I learn that you can buy a roof-top tent for the Mini Countryman, which is one of those things that's simultaneously naff and awesome.
Attendance is capped at 150,000, but it was still extremely busy. For the following set of images I used a simple formula - I stood about six feet from the car and shot the badge - but even that was difficult because it was hard even to stand still.
It was a hot, stuffy day. The Veuve Clicquot was £45 a glass. The newspapers talk of economic decline but I saw no evidence of malaise; perhaps the party will go on forever.
Now, I'm not a professional action sports photographer. I generally dislike commodity-style photographs. There's very little room for "you" unless you're exceptionally good, and being exceptionally good is not easy. Have you ever seen Airliners.net? It's full of objectively great photographs of airliners, but they all look the same, and more importantly they have AIRLINERS.NET banners because from the owners' point of view the photographers are fungible. In a fungible field you can rise to the top with hard work, but even the greatest gunslinger has a bullet with his name on it, and when it strikes you'll end up in an unmarked grave like everybody else.
Also, Goodwood's track is narrow, and the background is very busy. Contemplate the following image:
That's a lot of middle-aged men wearing shirts and cargo shorts. You can't see the cargo shorts but they're there, hidden behind the hay. The fantasy of Goodwood is Rosamund Pike in a white dress, but the reality is overweight middle-aged men wearing shirts and cargo shorts. Why is Rosamund Pike glamorous? Partially the shape; partially because in a world of overweight middle-aged men in shirts and cargo shorts Rosamund Pike is rare. If everybody looked like Rosamund Pike or Gemma Arterton, we would instead dream about Bernard Manning farting.
Ordinarily, if you want to blur out a background you choose a wide aperture, but paradoxically that's counterproductive with motorsports because you end up shooting at 1/1000th, which freezes the car in motion. You end up with a boring shot of a car sitting on the track with some blurry faces in the distance. The classic technique for motorsports is panning with a dragged shutter. In the following image I stopped down to f/11, 1/90th while tracking the car, which turned the background into streaks at the expense of ultimate sharpness:
Ideally an f/2.8 telephoto wide open with a polarising filter or ND filter to slow down the shutter would be perfect, but it would also be awkward - you would be composing through a dim viewfinder, and some cameras only have high-precision autofocus if their sensors get t/2.8 or thereabouts, e.g. f/2.8's-worth of light.
There is another option. Cheating with PhotoShop. Slow-speed shutter dragging is quick, dirty, and effective, but erratic. It's a lot like life. Suppose you absolutely need to get an image of a Ford GT40 whizzing past the stands, and you can't afford the risk of getting a blurry shot? You can cheat by using PhotoShop's motion blur filter.
Contemplate the following:
It doesn't bring me joy. Middle-aged men again. Now contemplate the following image, which was the work of ten minutes in PhotoShop (layer via copy - motion blur - layer mask - eight minutes of work with a brush):
The masking could be better. It looks a bit like a cut-out sitting on top of a background. I could have added radial blur to the wheels, some blur to the edges of the car, etc, but it's good enough for the internet. The synthetic motion blur is smoother than the real thing. The other way to jazz up a photograph of a car is by tilting it, as per the old Batman TV show:
And that's the Goodwood Festival of Speed. As a grand day out it's expensive unless you really like cars, in which case cost is no object. From a photographic point of view it's frustrating, crowded, physically demanding if you're carrying a lot of water and a camera and a big lens (it's a hill!). If you have kids, you're going to have to carry them over your head if you want them to see the Hillclimb. Ordinarily I pooh-pooh the idea of grandstand seating at festivals - it feels wrong - but if you want to photograph the cars on the Hillclimb having a Grandstand pass might make sense, especially if you sit near the front.
Sadly you will have to accept that, unless you have a press pass and a budget, you will get better results with Gran Turismo 6, but even that's slightly difficult. Gran Turismo Sport for the PlayStation 4 doesn't have Goodwood - the game focuses on competitive multiplayer, not time trials - and the PlayStation 3 is extremely difficult to emulate, so the only way to play Gran Turismo 6 is with an actual physical PS3. But you can also use it to watch Blu-Rays, and also play Journey, and during the winter months it will heat up your house, the end.
