It's Goodwood weekend.
That means a couple of things. It means that your internet consumption is set to fluctuate over the course of the weekend. It means Mad Mike Whiddett gets to strut his stuff and do what he does best. And, it means that a select group of immaculate and amazing race cars are going to crash.
It's one of the best things about the Goodwood Festival of Speed; that the cars present tend to get pushed to their limits regardless of how rare they may be. As such we've seen numerous cars come unstuck over the years. And it happens to the best of them, even including New Zealand's own Rod Millen, who binned his Pikes Peak Toyota Tacoma a few years ago. Those hay bales are deceptively lethal things...
And there's already been one quite frightening spill overnight.
It involved a Ford RS200 and rallycross ace Pat Doran; the pair crashing into the bales on the outside of Molecomb corner. It's a corner that's chewed up and spat out a whole host of different classics over the years, and that looks set to continue in 2017.
It's clear that Doran lost control of the rear of the car quite early in the piece. You can see his mind at work as he tries to flick the car into a drift to hopefully power out of the impact, but the move was unsuccessful — sending the car into the wall and sending pieces of debris all over the track.
Group B machines, as you'll know, were rather dangerous things when they hit the Tarmac in the '70s and '80s. So it's great to see Pat emerge from the RS200 unscathed.