[ad_1]
Rennie Scaysbrook | October 12, 2022
If there’s one race meeting you need to go to before you ride off into the sunset, it’s the Goodwood Revival in the UK.
Photography by Jahn Photography
The modern age is exhausting. When viewed through rose-tinted glasses, the past can look very rosy indeed. The technological age we live in now feels evermore detached from reality, but what if I were to tell you there is a place where time seemingly stopped at the beginning of the 1970s? Would you want to take the trip?
I would hope so, because such a place exists in the south of England.
The Goodwood Revival is the world’s premier historic race meeting for cars and motorcycles, but it’s much more than just a race. Period attire is mandatory—the ladies and their frocks, the gentlemen in all manner of suits, racing overalls, slacks and suspenders—and the machines that made motor sport what it is today, it’s a petrol-head’s paradise.
We tagged along to Goodwood 2022 with BMW Motorrad to watch Eugene Laverty and his ultra-exotic 1929 BMW R57 Kompressor (supercharged) racer, but the racing was almost a sideshow to the sheer extravagance of the Goodwood Revival itself.
Our trip started in London and had us riding BMW R 18 and R nineT machines north to Milton Keynes to visit the historic Marshall Amplification factory, the same factory that produced the amps that Jimmy Hendrix and Slash insisted on to make them as famous as they became.
Marshall’s link with motorcycling stems from them being the speaker supplier for the R 18 cruiser lineup—the R 18 First Edition, Bagger and Transcontinental—and once we’d had our fill of music mayhem in the purpose-built recording studio that had mixing desks from the Rolling Stones and Metallica, it was off to Oxford and the Mini Cooper plant.
BMW purchased Mini in 1996 and led a transformation of the iconic British brand. Compared to the heady days of the 1960’s, the Mini Cooper plant of today is lightyears ahead—robots do most of the work, from welding to painting to cutting—with human hands taking care of the electronics and trim work. It’s hard not to feel inferior when in the presence of one robot that can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, let alone 60 of them in the same place.
But the trip was really about the Goodwood Revival. This is a place you really must experience at least once in your life. Goodwood represents an absolute sensory overload. CN
Click here to read the 2022 Goodwood Revival article in the Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine.
Click here for all the latest Road Racing news.
[ad_2]
Source link