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.
The people flipping all the bicycles in a Dutch town made it over to Goodwood.
https://www.facebook.com/sikkom/videos/alle-fietsen-op-de-kop/673115595704864/
Started with the Traffic. Next up was the Rodius. They hurt their backs and inhaled too much Rodius dust so they had to be treated.
Is there a curb anywhere near there? Hitting one of those sideways is the only way I can figure out how to roll a van over. But maybe someone is more creative.
So, I don’t know how people are still firing off fireworks around here NINE days after the 4th of July.
And how seeing the picture you posted was a Renault instead of a Ford Connect. I mean, on a more focused look (and I wasn’t going Ford Focus there), I saw the badging. But my first glance, it was a Ford. Is it racist to say all vans look alike? I don’t think so.
I guess I am losing my mind almost as fast as my 89-year-old mother. Yikes!
You know those displays of racing cars hanging overhead at goodwood ?
https://youtu.be/2wRalkgrK18?si=PtBvbqdGAHqVRzow
Well this is one of those parking lot versions.
Someone wanted to turn over the Rodius but they couldn’t look directly at it so they closed their eyes and they missed. Acceptable losses, Gentleman.
The Rodius is not as ugly as everyone has made it out to be. And the mechanical bits seem to be pretty sound.
I’ve driven worse.
Maybe it’s supposed to be upside down like this one in this article
https://www.motortrend.com/events/weird-wacky-cars-2018-woodward-dream-cruise
It’s a repeat of the 1478 Horse and Carriage Writers’ Riots, protesting the arrival of the printing press. Apparently, this time it’s something to do with AI.
Everyone knows they drive on the opposite side of the car over there.
[Insert Australia joke here]
Guerilla sculpture installation. If this were 20 years ago, I would have guessed Damien Hirst.
Banksy’s understudy, know as Bermsy. He’s from Bermondsey.
This is why you shouldn’t drive while tipsy.
Was it within the sightline of the Rodius? Clearly it passed out in horror.
Fast reverse and brutal steering wheel input.
Possibly an attempt to do a 180 drift in reverse.
Those don’t always end well.
I think Adiran kicked it when one of his design buddies took a picture of him driving the Rodius.
it’s just a Tluaner Cifart
Saw the Rodius, fell over in horror and shock, and died.
I think this is the correct answer. Same thing nearly happened to me.
https://www.suncropgroup.com/product/traffic/
Maybe the lawn just got treated.
No cows found in the field, so the pranksters resorted to van tipping.
Or it got tipped for good service.
That’s surprising to me, considering that in 7 years of at-times-slightly-reckless van ownership, I only ever felt like I had come close to flipping it over one time on a highway on-ramp I took faster than usual. And that was with an Econoline-150, which I assume would be much easier to flip than that thing.
But then, I guess many bets are off since it’s on a grassy incline. That would’ve been a very rare occurrence with mine.
Econolines are surprisingly sure-footed. I don’t have as much experience as you but I did spend a fair amount of time abusing a company E-250 when I worked for a catering company. Also my friend and I had a diesel E-350 and he drifted it getting on the highway once, after we put a sketchy tuner on it.
I’m still waiting for part 2 where he shows us the rest of the pictures… There’s no way these are the only 2 pictures taken especially with the weird divots in the ground. They’re not any other place in the field.
We got moved on very quickly.
Others in the media should have more pics, since they weren’t in a Rodius that needed to be expelled.
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.