With this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed and Revival cancelled and replaced by a new Speed Week event, the organisers saw fit to spice it up with some new motorsports activities in lieu of live spectators. These included a new rally stage for classic cars, as well as the inaugural ‘Goodwood Driftkhana’ which featured some of the best tyre-shredding action ever seen on the Goodwood grounds.
The new sideways-focused event takes place around some of the access roads around the Goodwood Circuit, with challenges such as curved walls and oil drums fitted with proximity sensors that drivers will have to trigger in order to avoid penalties.
Of course, being a Driftkhana event, the entries are also judged by their flamboyance instead of a straight timed shootout. As such, we saw drivers attempting different approaches to complete the challenge, which the Goodwood YouTube channel has graciously condensed into these two videos. Enjoy.
One of the best runs throughout the entire Goodwood Driftkhana event was done by James Deane, piloting his modified E92 BMW M3, affectionately called the Eurofighter. For those unaware, he is often regarded as the one of the best drifters in the world currently, with Formula Drift and Drift Masters European Championship titles already under his belt.
Deane blazed through the course with millimetre precision, sometimes looking as if he’s going to accidentally knock over some of the obstacles (which other competitors did). But of course with his expertise, needless to say the car was completely under his control at all times.
Aside from purpose-prepped drift cars, the Goodwood Driftkhana also featured some rallycross machines, such as the Ford Fiesta R5 and the all-electric Fiesta ERX. But the coolest entry to the Driftkhana challenge is definitely the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1400, driven by none other than Vaughn Gittin Jr.
With 1,400 hp and an undisclosed (though not hard to guess if you know where to look) amount of torque sent to all four wheels, the all-electric tyre-slaying machine danced gracefully around the hay bales and oil drums almost too easily, all while spitting out possibly the biggest amount of tyre fumes.
But what really stood out to us was just how quiet the Mustang Mach-E 1400 was while Vaughn Gittin Jr. gave it the full beans – especially when pitted against the other high-octane petroleum-powered competitors – I guess it’s a sound we’ll all have to get used to sooner than later.
