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.
That’s no ordinary MGA, with those Dunlop peg drive knock-off wheels it’s probably a Twin Cam. The hole in the hood may be an attempt to keep the carbs cool. The problem with the carbs going very lean turned out to be vibration at certain RPMs would make the carbs froth, but the symptoms were about the same as the carbs boiling and someone may have tried that as a cure when the car was new.
I understand that the real fix is to use manifold spacers that dampen the vibration at those speeds.
There was a certain stretch of I-405 in LA where the oscillations over the expansion joints would upset the carburetor in my ’68 Datsun 510 when going just the right/wrong speed. The engine would temporarily starve, and then the car would slow down to where things started working again.
I had a Ford f100 that a stretch of the 405 would make the hood spring open. I guess that’s why the hood has those slots up by the windshield, so you can see where you are going. My passenger was not amused. The second time it happened, on the same stretch of road, the same week, I bolted a hasp and padlock to the hood. Fortunately it was during the 1984 LA Olympics so there was hardly any traffic. That was pretty crazy. LA was relatively deserted except for Westwood,
That would be way more terrifying than the engine sputtering. Glad you survived!
While driving I’ve had two cars catch fire, four wheels fall off, the hood opening as recounted above, a tie rod fall off, a few bouts of carb icing. Oh and getting a convertible towing a trailer about 8 feet in the air and not bending the frame so badly that I couldn’t drive another 40 miles.
Other than that, unexpected objects in the roadway including stuff falling off trucks, and approaching traffic in the wrong direction . Oh and getting rear ended stopped at stoplights.
Anyway eventually you get conditioned to weird stuff happening, and drive assuming that stuff breaks and drive always expecting to need to do some high speed problem solving.
Oh, brakes. Wheel cylinder failed on a 64 valiant leaving no brakes, and booster diaphragms failed on a Mercedes diesel, sucking all the brake fluid into the engine, which caused the engine to briefly go into runaway mode at the same time as the brakes failed. Fun! Also a humongous cloud of smoke.
Oh oh the four wheels lost at speed, two were lost simultaneously on the rear, which was not terribly exciting. Of the other two wheels one was a CV joint failure on the Taconic Parkway at night which actually tore the front suspension off of my Volkswagen Dasher and sent me into a barrier, which is lucky because if the barrier hadn’t been there, it would’ve been much worse. The other loss of wheel incident was the rear wheel of a Honda motorcycle that within a fraction of a second broke the chain, tore the rear axle out of the chain side swing arm locked up the rear wheel, and tore it loose from the other swing arm. So I guess that only counts as loosing wheels in three incidents. On the other hand one of the “my car seems to be on fire” incidents was a hole in the exhaust setting a rear tire on fire, which really got their attention when I pulled into the New York State thruway service area.
Hood flying open? Meh.
Well, that’s a lot of stuff going catastrophically wrong. Maybe don’t get into aviation.
I worked for a woman who had three pictures of herself standing next to three wrecked planes, one balanced on its nose, all on grass strips in what looked like a like Alaska. I asked her about it and she said the first two she ground looped. So she decided that maybe tail draggers weren’t for her and switched to tricycle landing gear. Then she said she broke the front wheel off, and decided to get a house she didn’t have to fly too. Her business partner was a retired admiral who had started as an aviator and dismissively said “you call those plane wrecks?”
Some people are just like that. That guy that got struck by lightning seven times for example. Most people don’t make to two times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan
“ Sullivan had the strength and courage to strike the bear with a tree branch, despite the fact that his hair was on fire. He claimed that this was the twenty-second time he hit a bear with a stick in his lifetime”
Good luck with bears too apparently.
For what it so worth, I’ve sworn to never get anywhere near a helicopter.
Apparently, there are some incredibly lucky/blessed people on this planet.
I spent a decent amount of time in helicopters as a news photographer and still enjoy going up in them as a tourist. Those were all turbine-powered, expensive and because of that, well-maintained. I loved every second.
For my 50th birthday, my wife gave me a couple of hours of instruction in a Robinson R22. That thing scared the crap out of me. I already had a fixed-wing license and had about 200 hours in small Cessnas, but that thing just seemed like it was trying to shake itself apart.
The only reason I wouldn’t want to be in a “nice” helicopter is as a patient being flown to a hospital. I live a couple of blocks from a hospital with a helipad and 15 blocks from another. When I hear a Eurocopter/Airbus 135 or a Bell 407 coming into either one, I say a little prayer for the crew and the patient inside. It’s a bad day when you end up in one of those.
I don’t know, I look at a helicopter and all I see are a whole bunch of single points of failure right there on the top of it out in the open. A memento mori on a swash plate. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of other things where a broken screw can kill you but something about helicopters just seems too in your face.
You’re not wrong. They’re just fun to be in. Until they’re not, I guess.
I met a Viet Nam era pilot who got shot down three times in the military version of a Hughes/MD 500. The third time was in Laos, and he had to hike at night for three nights to get to somewhere he could safely get picked up.
But flying up on to a glacier in Alaska or around Kauai, without people who might not be your friends shooting at you, is a fun day for me.
Hey, it’s hard being a roll model.
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.
You have driven worse looking multi-people carriers?
What a Fiat Multipla Take 2 (aka the 90s/early 2000s version)?
I was referring more to the mechanicals, but yes, the 2nd Gen Multipla is one of the ugliest vehicles inflicted on modern civilization. But, no, I haven’t driven one. Closest I came to that was a 1987 Ducato van. Which wasn’t awful.
Haha I 100 percent agree 2nd gen Fiat Multipla as a wonderfully ugly car.
And I absolutely love it to a large extent Because some group of someones looked at and approved it for sale, ugly exterior be damned.
There’s something incredibly liberating driving an ugly form over function car like the 2nd Gen Fiat Multipla.
I’d drive one. Not as ugly as current Lexus designs.
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
I think I have the answer. There is a small group of van cabovers who sole purpose in life seems to be trying to achieve a van stoppie. Search YouTube for Econoline stoppies. I think the van driver tried it and went all the way over.
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]
I was gonna, but it seemed cheeky.
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.
The sight of the Rondius Was upsetting many many people with several visibly getting sick
There was an incident involving vomit and the Rodius this weekend, but I have to check whether I can talk about it.
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.