So far, Goodwood has been a blast and I feel like I’ve seen so many fascinating things. “Fascinating,” by the way, is a wonderfully vague word, and I think the boundaries of that word are vast enough to include such things as varied as the design and engineering glorious madness of the Mercedes-Benz Blue Wonder or the Lexus LFA successor or, yes, even the sight of a Renault Trafic van completely upside-down in the media parking area. It’s that last one I want to talk about now.
This is something we saw yesterday as we were returning to our trusty and deeply homely SsangYong Rodius, which was parked on a grassy hillside in the large field designated for media parking, a convenient walk of an (estimated) billionty kilometers from the main show.
We made our way though the parked cars, many of which were interesting and required stopping at and scrutinizing, like, say, this MGA:
What’s going on with that extra round intake at the front there? Must be something fun under that hood that enjoys gulping air.
Anyway, when we finally made it back to where the Rodius was parked – it’s always easy to find because you just need to listen for the sound of every car around it getting devalued and the sobbing of any children who may have happened to look directly at it – and noticed something mildly unusual:
A Land Rover Defender emergency vehicle! How cool! We certainly don’t have those in the States!
Oh, wait, there’s something else:
Now, I’m not familiar with how everything is done here in the UK, but I’m fairly certain that’s not how you park a van.
Yes, there was a Renault Trafic violating the old CB-era rule of keeping the shiny side up, yet otherwise looking in pretty good shape. All we really know is that this seems to be a 2023 Renault Trafic diesel and no one was hurt. I’m glad to hear no one was hurt for multiple reasons, but at this moment because then I can write about it with less guilt.
What fascinates me here is how this happened? There’s no room to drive crazy fast in this area, so I don’t think this was because of reckless, high-speed driving. There’s no huge skid marks or long gouges in the turf, either.
This part of the field was a pretty noticeable hill, and I suspect that had to be a factor here, though I’m not entirely clear about how. I can imagine doing just the right wrong kind of turn at just the wrong angle and giving it just the wrong amount of brake, throttle, or both, and the tall, top-heavy van just sort of pitching over?
But I’m still not clear at all how one does a low-speed full-van-inversion like this, especially one that seems to have caused pretty minimal damage to the van.
What I’m saying is I’m impressed, and I’d be delighted to hear your speculations about how one accomplishes turning a Trafic into a ɔᴉɟɐɹʇ.
Driving along an incline, stab the throttle a little, the van squirms as the front wheels slip downhill on the dry grass, overcorrect and over she goes.
When two of my older siblings were in high school (more than 50 years ago! Where the heck does the time go?!?) they would sometimes go ghost-hunting or “ghost-chasing” as they called it (this was before Ghostbusters and all those Discovery Channel ghost-hunting shows) with friends at night, especially around Halloween, as there were a lot of abandoned old farmhouses in the countryside and some of them had reputations for being haunted. Late one Halloween night, well after midnight so technically All Saints’ Day, lol, my siblings & their friends found such a farmhouse with several junked cars sitting in the front yard. While exploring inside the house they didn’t find anything of note but found themselves overcome with such an ominous feeling of dread that they collectively decided to get the hell out of there. Early the next morning they went back to the house only to find it burned to the ground; it appeared like it had burned down recently but in terms of weeks or months prior. They thought maybe they had the wrong house but some of my siblings’ friends recognized the junked cars in the front yard as being the same ones they had seen the very night before; they also drove up and down the road to ascertain that there were no other houses. What was most inexplicable, however, was how all the cars were upside down on their roofs but sitting in the same spots in the grass, that is, they had not simply been tipped over and rolled over onto their roofs as they would have ended up in different spots in the yard. They were still in the same spots albeit on their roofs as if they had been lifted straight up and turned over and plunked back down in the same spots. And there were no tracks in the yard from, say, forklifts or tractors that could have lifted the cars. My siblings & their friends found only the tracks from their own cars in the yard from the night before.
Spooooooky!!
So one wonders if that Land Rover Defender emergency vehicle was equipped with EMF meters for detecting ghosts (as well as unlicensed nuclear accelerator proton packs.) After all, the British Isles are said to be among the most haunted locales in the world…
Damn fine alibi Torch, almost had me buying it.
I’m guessing the people inside it had no idea it was tipsy either. While not as much fun as all the other guesses, I’d guess it was a combination of people standing or sitting on one side of the van (someone had to exit the sliding door), the van needing to turn around, and the presence of bumps in the vicinity of the turnaround to unsettle the suspension at the right time.
Anyway it happened, I bet the driver had one of those “ohhhhhh shiiiiiiiit” moments that seemed to last forever.
Funny as the van situation is the Rodius next to those 2 Ferraris is still my favorite part of this story.