What it’s Like to Drive a Race Car at Goodwood

It’s a little bit strange being at Goodwood when there are no crowds. The estate – the family seat of the Duke of Richmond – plays host to two of the world’s busiest and most eclectic car shows. There’s the Festival of Speed, a hill-climb spectacle and manufacturer showcase which takes place in the summer, followed by the Revival in September, dedicated to the finest historic racing over the road on the Motor Circuit. It is the latter where I found myself on a sunny October day. There were no queues of vehicles creeping towards a car park, and people were scarce. There were, however, a few DTO Motorsport-branded race cars parked carefully in the paddock. These black-and-white liveried machines are what brought me here, as they are part of Goodwood’s new ProDriver experience, which allows keen motorists to get behind the wheel of a fully prepared race car.

Goodwood is hallowed ground for those with a need for speed, having hosted some of the UK's most competitive professional racing. It opened in 1948, as did Silverstone (interestingly, both tracks were former RAF bases). Silverstone hosted the first Grand Prix that year, with Goodwood instead focussing on non-championship F1 races, as well as sports and GT cars. The track welcomed the biggest names of the day before closing in 1966: Giuseppe Farina, the first ever F1 World Champion who won the 1951 Goodwood Trophy, while the likes of Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Sir Jackie Stewart and Mike Hawthorn all competed around its sweeping bends. Sir Stirling Moss had a career-ending crash at Goodwood in 1962, while Bruce McLaren, founder of the eponymous marque, tragically died there during testing in 1970. One of the things that made Goodwood so dangerous were the high speeds achieved through the track’s narrow, flowing corners, and the estate’s refusal to update the track in line with ever-increasing speeds culminated in the estate halting professional racing in 1966.

Today, the Motor Circuit features the exact layout it did then. It remains – unsurprisingly – just as challenging. As part of the ProDriver experience, it is your job to try to conquer it, but a job cushioned by the presence of the DTO team. A professional coaching outfit, DTO, has partnered with Goodwood for ProDriver, allowing participants to get the full race driver experience for a day. You get partnered up with an instructor who will coach you through the steps, from talking you through the ideal racing line, to perfecting it on the real-life track. The day involves four fifteen-minute sessions in a race car of your choice, as well as data sessions in which you can track braking points and throttle input to count how many G-forces you’re pulling. You can subsequently practise it all on the sim before heading back out there to attempt to shave seconds off your best lap.

Among the fleet of cars that decorated the Goodwood paddock for the day included a Ferrari 488 Challenge Evo, a McLaren 570 GT4, a Ginetta G56 GTA, a Porsche 718 and a Mercedes-AMG GTR. My choice was the smallest and most balanced of the lot: a BMW M2 CS Racing. It looks fairly similar to a regular, road-going M2, but once you get up close, they’re worlds apart. A gaping front grille provides improved cooling to the race-tuned 3.0-litre, twin-turbo straight-six engine’s radiator, while racing slick tyres offer added grip. Inside, the interior is completely stripped out, with a full roll cage, bucket seats and a six-point harness that keeps you strapped in. The rectangular, multi-buttoned steering wheel leaves no guesses as to what this car’s purpose is.

Getting behind the wheel for the first time is an intimidating experience. When buckled in, you sit impossibly low with the cage closing in around you. The buckets wrap around your sides, while the HANS device locks your shoulders into position. There is nowhere to look other than straight ahead. Like riding a motorbike, you are forced to succumb to the machine, becoming part of it as you thrust it forward (or vice versa).

The M2 has 365bhp, can hit 0-60mph in 3.6 seconds, and boasts a top speed of 174mph, but it is not the speed that impresses most. The car rides like it’s on rails, in part to its balance, in part to the slick tyres, which take a lap to warm up before adhering loyally to the tarmac. It responds to the smallest of inputs, the front end turning in with just a fraction of steering angle and inspiring immediate confidence. This was further aided by my instructor, Nick Jackson, who took a day off from racing himself to coach me through Goodwood’s quirks. My Achilles heel proved to be the chicane (the slow right-left before the finish straight, which requires you to keep momentum before powering past the pit line). After looking at data in between track time, we settled on a “sling shot” technique, in which you take a sharper entry and hang it out wide before accelerating earlier out of the corner. It worked, and helped me cut my best lap down to a mid-1:28.

After my final lap, I was knackered, but, following a final data session in which I discovered my “ideal” lap time is a 1:27 (the computer combines all your fastest individual sector times into a predicted best), I felt a burning desire to get back out there. The track is closed due to the local time curfew, so a few more laps on the simulator had to do. Racing, it turns out, is incredibly addictive. Nick already knows this: “We sell the most expensive drug in the world,” he tells me. He’s not wrong.

For more on the Goodwood ProDriver experience, click here.