The view from the balcony

I first went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2010 and, as the self confessed ‘world’s biggest Formula 1 superfan’, it has quickly become one of my favourite weekends of the year. At the time, I was a Grand Prix driver myself and stood in the holding area with others from the 2010 grid including Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg and Mark Webber, but really wanted to spend the whole time hunting for my heroes and looking at the epic machines they drove.

As my driving career has morphed into a media one, over the past 15 years that I’ve been going back to FoS, I’ve been incredibly lucky to balance driving some brilliant cars but also interviewing and spending time with truly wonderful people. I’ve driven several championship-winning F1 cars up the hill, plus Le Mans winners, Can-Am cars and even Colin McRae’s iconic Subaru Impreza. But why are these cars so special to me? It’s not the successes they notched up per se, but the people behind their wheels who delivered them.

And there is no better theatre for receiving these heroes than the balcony at Goodwood House. Max Verstappen may have been booed – unfairly – by the Silverstone crowd last year but he got an unbelievable reception from the FoS crowd. Sebastian Vettel was incredibly popular as were the 500cc motorbike heroes Mick Doohan, Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Rainey and Kenny Roberts. We’ve had some of motorsport’s hardest characters like Derek Bell and Nigel Mansell in tears and even the ‘King’ Richard Petty was blown away by the reception.