By Simon Hildrew

Jake Hill was in record-breaking form at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last weekend - but he wasn’t the only Kent driver in action at the meeting’s 30th anniversary.

Tenterden’s Mini racing ace, Nick Swift, entered his 1965 Mini Cooper S and took part in the Goodwood 75 class of the timed shoot-out. Facing tough opposition against faster and more powerful machinery, Swift set the fastest class time in practice before clocking 59.17sec in the Final - good enough to claim fourth in class and 30th overall from 46 cars.

Swift also topped the times in the Goodwood 75 - Return to Racing demo-run category.

Wrotham-based British Touring Car Championship team Motorbase Performance brought their 2022 NAPA Racing Ford Focus ST to West Sussex with current championship leader Ash Sutton. Competing against BTCC rival Hill in the saloon and stock cars class of the shoot-out, Sutton finished fourth with a time of 55.27.

The outright winner of the shoot-out was Marvin Kirchhofer, driving the new McLaren Solus GT Hypercar, with a spectacular 45.34 for the second-fastest time up the hill.

Sevenoaks racer Chris Goodwin brought his recently-acquired 1968 McLaren M6B Can-Am sports car to support the daily demonstrations for McLaren’s 60th anniversary.

Looking stunning in the original papaya orange colour scheme, the M6A version of this car dominated the American Can-Am series in 1967 with team owner Bruce McLaren and team-mate Denny Hulme taking five wins from six races and Bruce winning the title. The M6B version was then developed in 1968 for customer use in Can-Am and other racing series.

With Porsche celebrating 75 years of sports cars this year and the Le Mans 24 Hours now 100, a spectacular collection of cars were driven on the hill with former winners re-united with their 24-hour winning machines.

Porsche hold the record with 19 outright wins. The first of those came in 1970, when Richard Attwood was victorious in the iconic 917k. Attwood demonstrated the actual car, now kept in the Porsche Museum, passing the Porsche celebration sculpture in front of Goodwood House. Two months earlier, he and team-mate Hans Herrmann raced the car through torrential rain to finish third in the BOAC 1,000k race at Brands Hatch.

Goodwood’s 75-year celebration class featured a huge variety of cars, spread over four categories that encompassed the past and present of the circuit and the festival. The racing years group, for cars that raced during the circuit’s original period of 1948 to 1966, included a Lola Mk1 sports car that won the final race at Goodwood in 1966 and continues to race regularly at the circuit’s revival and members’ meetings.

The Lola was the final Mk1 chassis to be built in 1962 at their small workshop in Bromley, where founder Eric Broadley had set up in 1958.

The next event at Goodwood will be the revival meeting on September 8-10. Tickets are available at www.goodwood.com