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Over the brow through the bends revving hard in third before snatching fourth just before the finishing line

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Over the brow, through the bends, revving hard in third before snatching fourth just before the finishing line...I've just blasted a proper GT40, in the most famous colour scheme, up the Goodwood hill Now I can die happy. But, as if the GT40 wasn't enough, on the Saturday I wrestled with the most potently slithery car I've ever had the good fortune to experience. Down to the start, loop round, and Nigel Mansell in a Formula One Lotus will shortly be on my tail. This is fantastic, a dream come true 40 years after it took root I go as fast as dare, because I can't miss the chance.

I'm learning the semi-sequential ZF gearbox's right-handed gearshift, memorising all the switches and dials, bracing my left foot for the very heavy clutch. I can easily convince myself I won Le Mans four worryingly short decades ago. I am Bruce McLaren, I am set to pound around the Le Mans circuit for a total of half a day at speeds well beyond 200mph. And on Goodwood Friday I drove it up the hill, as fast as I dared, and a very large box gained a very large, gold-plated tick...I'm first out of the paddock in my batch, just me and the car.

For this year's 40th anniversary of the win, Ford has recast its long-serving GT40 race-car demonstrator - owned continuously since 1966 - as a replica of the black car with silver stripes driven to Le Mans victory by Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon. And, most important of all, the public can get right up to the racing and rally cars in the paddocks and mingle with the owners and drivers in between tyre-smoking runs up the steepening hill. Let objectivity go hang The Ford GT40 is my favourite racing car, ever. I made slot-racer models of it when I was young, I followed every nuance of its career, I jumped for joy when it had its finest hour (4pm, 19June, 1966) when seven-litre GT40 MkIIs finished first, second and third at Le Mans as Ford proved that, having been rebuffed in its attempt to buy Ferrari, it could beat the Italian company instead. There are also displays of cars as art and beauty (one of this year's eight themes in the Cartier Style et Luxe display was "Modernism on the Move: Coachbuilt Fantasies of the Streamlined Age", including a fabulous 1938 Phantom Corsair and a cute 1938 Skoda Monte Carlo Coup? There is a grand ball on the Saturday evening (Steve Winwood played this year). There are timed runs, tortured tyres, and fabulous mechanical music There is nothing else quite like it in the world. It's a fantastic event.

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