Goodwood Festival of Speed

Indeed so. Now, five months on, the powers-that-be at Renault have decided - in spite of everything gone before - that they want Mansell back in a Williams, and are sparing neither effort nor chequebook in their attempts to make it happen. Until recently, I would have thought a reconciliation between Alan Sugar and Terry Venables more likely, but there you are. Never say 'never' in this business.

As the lawyers and the power-brokers endlessly wade through the legal complications of Mansell driving a Ford-powered, Texaco-fuelled, car one weekend, and racing with the products of Renault and Elf the next, Williams folk have clearly grown bored with the calls. Last Friday they issued a press release, announcing they had nothing to announce.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the following day I went, blissfully, to Goodwood. My last four weekends have been varied, you can say that: Barcelona, Milwaukee, Montreal, and now the place of which Roy Salvador! famously said: "Give me Goodwood on a summer's day, and you can keep the rest of the world."

If one were seeking an antidote to the tragedy and turmoil of the recent past - to say nothing of the hype of the present - one could have chosen no better place. To visit Goodwood's Festival of Speed was to be reminded of why one originally fell in love with this sport, and that, given the last couple of months in Grand Prix racing, did not come amiss.

Undoubtedly, it will have been more stirring to one of my generation than to younger enthusiasts. I was first taken to a Formula 1 race in 1954, when I was eight years old, so that my earliest motor racing recollections are not of guardrails and motorhomes, but of straw bales and haphazard paddocks. Goodwood, happily, was just so.

A couple of weeks ago, wandering in New York, I caught the distant strains of Del Shannon's Runaway, and was instantly transported from Greenwich Village back to the summer of 1961, to Ferrari's 1-2-3-4 with the shark-nose cars at Spa-Francorchamps, to Ted Dexter's 180 against the Australians at Edgbaston, and who knows what else. These things are important, you know...

In the same way, Goodwood was an odd place to be reminded of Wally Meskowski. This was a leading Indycar crew chief, and sometime sprint car owner, of the fifties and sixties, and a man for whom every American driver of consequence worked at some point. Teddy Mayer may once have likened racing drivers to light bulbs - "You unplug one, and plug in another" - but, compared with Meskowski, the former McLaren boss comes over as sentimental. "Wally," says a former employee, Mario Andretti, "was made of marble."

On one occasion, a driver dared to ask Meskowski for time off, in order to attend the funeral of a friend. "Why d'you wanna go to his funeral?" came the reply. "He ain't comin' to your's..."

Excuse the digression, but all these thoughts came into my head as I wandered through the Goodwood paddock, and came upon a gorgeous Indy roadster, the Turtle Drilling Special. Driver: Sam Hanks ran the legend by the cockpit, and then, beneath, Chief mechanic: Wally Meskowski.

I have a particular passion for the Indy roadster era, and if the presence of this particular car seemed a touch incongruous in a quintessentially English setting, it didn't matter. Virtually everything in the paddock was to drool over.

Indeed, there was almost a surfeit of riches, so that one hardly knew where to turn next. A Maserati 250F never fails to stop me in my tracks, and another particular favourite has always been Dan Gurney's Eagle-Weslake V12 from 1967. Both of these I saw within seconds of arrival; there was much more beyond.

Even as a kid, I was never turned on by the VI6 BRM, a car 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing', if ever there was one, as opposed to the sublime Alfa Romeo 158, which made an even better noise, and not only finished Grands Prix, but won them, too. Both were present at Goodwood, the dark red Alfetta appropriately leaving a whiff of Castrol R on the breeze.

Mercedes-Benz, too, were represented, with John Surtees at the wheel of the 1937 W125, and Stirling Moss in the W196, which he raced throughout 1955. At the end of a practice run, Stirling brought the car back to the paddock, and if he climbed out with a bit less alacrity than 40 years ago, still he looked the part, complete with light blue overalls and familiar white helmet. Crowds swarmed around him, as they always did, as they always will.

Amid all this nostalgia, the saddest realisation, yet again, was the decline, then the virtual disappearance, of sports car racing. On parade at Goodwood were such as Maserati's 300S, still to me the most beautiful sports-racing car ever built, a 750 Monza, a TR6l and a 330P4 from Ferrari, together with D-Type Jaguars, sundry Aston Martins, and the like. A Porsche 917 from 1970 served to rekindle memories of Rodriguez and Siffert - and to remind me that it was the FIA's ban on cars like this, a year or so later, that began to wither my interest in sports car racing.

At one time, if I didn't go to Le Mans, I would unfailingly listen to progress reports on the radio throughout the night. Last weekend, it took the Sunday papers to remind me that the race was in progress.

It is a long time since I enjoyed a day at a race circuit as much as last Saturday at Goodwood. The organisers of the Festival of Speed have got the blend and balance of the event about perfect, and their only possible problem in the future, it seems to me, may be to maintain it in its current format. So long as they do, I, for one, will be there.

In the meantime, next stop is Magny-Cours on Sunday week, by which time the identity of Damon Hill's Renault team mate will presumably be known. David Coulthard - a man of the future - will be holding his breath.