Goodwood, West Sussex - For many visitors to the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed, the highlight of the weekend is the Supercar Run, featuring some of the world’s fastest street-legal cars.
Since the inauguration of timed runs for supercars in 2000, it has become a tradition for makers of high-performance cars to show their latest and fastest models in public for the first time “on the hill’.
Festival visitors are often treated to the sight of exotics they’ve never seen before, going flat out up the hill, just a few metres away on the the other side of the hay-bales. Since there’s a lot of brand pride at stake, the factory test drivers who take the latest supercars up the hill are encouraged to give it horns, and the results can be awe-inspiring.
The Festival is held in the grounds of Goodwood House, the home of the Earl of March, and the famous hillclimb course is actually a private road on the estate.
It’s 1860 metres long, with nine corners, and the finish is almost 100 metres higher than the start, for an average gradient of 4.9 percent. The course record is 41.6 seconds, set in 1999 by Nick Heidfeld in a McLaren MP4/13 Formula One car. Since F1 cars are no longer allowed to do timed runs for safety reasons, it’s unlikely ever to be beaten - but some of the supercars are only a few seconds slower.
Turn the sound up to the max and enjoy the highlights of the 2017 Supercar Runs with us, featuring Porsche, Pagani, Aston Martin, Maserati, Bugatti, a Nissan GT-R Nismo and the latest version of the Audi R8, among many others.