There comes a moment at Goodwood when you stop trying to pick your favourite car and surrender to the noise. Somewhere between watching a 1937 Mercedes-Benz W125 thunder up a hillside and holding a piece of a 2018 McLaren F1 car, you realise the Goodwood Festival of Speed is not really a car show. It is a sensory assault of burning rubber, dust and a level of noise that rattles your chest before your brain has time to react.Spread across the estate of the duke of Richmond in West Sussex, the Festival of Speed is the largest automotive garden party on earth, and this year, quietly, it had an Irish fingerprint on its most extraordinary machine.The Red Bull RB17 is either the most extreme hypercar ever built or proof the line between a track car and a Formula One machine is finally starting to be erased.Designed by Adrian Newey, the man behind the majority of Red Bull’s championship-winning F1 cars, the RB17 will cost the buyer about €6.7 million. For that money you get a 1,200-horsepower hybrid V-10 power-train engine, the carbon-fibre body and a certain exclusivity: only 50 will be built.The Red Bull RB17 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed At this year’s festival, Newey himself took it for a spin.While waiting for Newey to return the RB17 to the paddock, we chanced upon one of the team behind the supercar, who happens to hail from Co Armagh. Chris Sharkey was one of the lead vehicle testing engineers on the RB17 project, the result of which Red Bull bills its most ambitious creation outside of F1. Despite his senior engineering role on the project, today Sharkey’s job is to haul the precious RB17 back on to stage once Newey is done with his hill climb. The hill climb at the core of the festival is a narrow strip of tarmac running from the house to the top of the estate, and on it, across the weekend, some of the most significant cars in motorsport history are let loose. Not in a museum. But actually driven, flat out, by the people who know the cars’ limits.Cars on display at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed This year’s running order reflected a fever dream for any motorsport fan. A 1961 Ferrari 156 Sharknose – one of the most valuable Ferraris in existence – ran alongside Ayrton Senna’s McLaren-Ford MP4/8, though the latter appeared lacking its famous Marlboro livery. Ferrari F2008 and the Scuderia Ferrari SF21, driven by Marc Gene, Red Bull’s RB8 and RB18. Car after car carrying decades of history, sent up the hill as if it were the most unobtrusive thing in the world.And then there were the drivers. Goodwood does not cordon them off. Arvid Lindblad, Nikola Tsolov and Alisha Palmowski, currently leading the F1 Academy standings, were all loitering in the paddock, moving between garages, accessible in a way that would be unthinkable at a Grand Prix weekend. Sebastian Loeb is one of those poster boys for petrolheads, wandering the paddocks.Loeb has won nine World Rally Championship titles. He has raced GT cars, competed at Le Mans, tackled Pikes Peak, and tested a Formula One car.The Frenchman is now focused on winning the Dakar Rally, the one big prize that has so far eluded him. This year’s campaign did not go to plan early on, though Loeb characteristically frames it without drama.“Very often it happens that I lose some time at the beginning and then I catch up,” he says. “But the gap is done. I will try again next year.” Dakar, he notes, demands a different mindset to anything else he has done. “Sometimes you have to accept going slow to preserve the car, the tyres especially. It’s not always easy to find the right rhythm.”[ A teacher once warned me I’d end up a drifter. Turns out it’s a white-knuckle rideOpens in new window ]In 2007, Loeb competed in the Rally Ireland, winning it in front of more than 250,000 spectators. “I think it’s the only time in my life, except Monte Carlo, where we were driving with snow tyres in the rain,” he says. “So much water on the road. It was one of the most difficult rallies that we did. But I won it, and the atmosphere was incredible.”“If the next round of the Cross Country World Championship were in Ireland, then I would come for sure.”If Loeb represents the composed, decorated end of the motorsport spectrum, “Mad Mike” Whiddett is something else entirely. The New Zealand drifter has spent his career building cars that should not work and then winning with them anyway, most recently taking a front-wheel-drive hatchback, installing a 1,400-horsepower four-rotor twin-turbo engine, converting it to rear-wheel drive, and taking it to Pikes Peak for two world records on its first attempt.New Zealand drifter 'Mad Mike' Whiddett at the Goodwood Festival of Speed His current project goes further. “We are currently doing an old-school 80s Formula One and putting a rotary engine into it,” he says, standing in front of his car in the Red Bull garage. “There’s never been a rotary engine put into an F1 chassis. Nor one attempted to drift. It’s been super challenging – well above our engineering standard for our capabilities – but we’re figuring it out because no one else has ever done this.” He pauses. “If you’re not nervous, the reward isn’t big enough.”It is a philosophy that extends to how he thinks about the sport more broadly. “The biggest trophy I can win is inspiring one kid on the other side of the fence to just chase their dreams and do exactly what I did,” he says.He has lived that philosophy at home too; his son Link recently won the New Zealand Off-Road Racing Championship, having first taken the title at 13, though the rules required him to be 17 to claim it officially.Whiddett is generous on the subject of Irish drifting. Unprompted, he names Cork brothers Jack and Connor Shannan, from Killavullen, along with fellow Corkman James Deane from Castletownroche. “The Irish, right now, are the best,” he says. “The last Formula Drift podium was all Irish.” Conor Shannan, he adds, is a driver he observes closely. “He’s had two titles now. He’s crushing it.”The interview is interrupted by Damon Hill’s championship-winning car roaring past on its way back to its paddock space. Its V12 doesn’t so much fill the air as displace it.Whiddett turns his head, looking like a kid in a sweet shop, and waits for the noise to subside. “Just so you know,” he says, “that was Damon Hill reuniting with his championship-winning car. Very freaking cool.”Somewhere between a pre-war Mercedes going flat out and holding a piece of a McLaren F1 car, Goodwood succeeds because history isn’t displayed here. It’s started, revved up and driven flat out.