A couple more trips down to Goodwood for the Daytona.

The unseasonably fine weather in April has meant that I have been able to enjoy the Daytona rather more than expected. It’s become a fairly annual tradition that my Father and I head down to the Goodwood for the GRRC’s annual Spring Sprint. It’s only a small event, with club members competing to set the fastest lap of the circuit from a standing start. It’s real appeal is the eclectic mixture of cars competing, from a vintage Wolseley right up to a Porsche 997 Carrera Cup complete with a very large additional silencer to pass the somewhat draconian noise test required for the event!

Dad had some friends over from the States who also wanted to come to the event, necessitating we take two Ferraris. Dad took his California, and with a spare seat available, fellow Drive Cult-er Martin Spain rode with me in the Daytona. No doubt a few of Martin’s photographs from the Day will be added to the Drive Cult gallery in due course.

Following the California it was quite striking how loud the modern V8 Ferrari is in comparison with the classic V12, especially at idle. At junctions and traffic lights the bellow from the (standard) exhaust could clearly be heard over the not exactly quiet V12 in the Daytona.  Noise is Dad’s one major criticism of the California, although it's more the tyre noise than the exhaust (which is more noticeable outside rather than in) that annoys him.

Returning from the event, I was reminded of one of the other aspects of owning a classic Ferrari in 2011, as the car had been ‘papped’. On Twitter, @alexfgear - photographer for fgear.tv - had sent me the link to his Flickr page where he had posted a number of photographs of the car in the car park at Goodwood that day. I was amused that he had ignored the California parked next to it, although he did say the postioning of the cars was not ideal for photographing it.

The Daytona has also been in the media a little as well; DK Engineering used a picture of the Daytona in their news piece for their recent open day. The same picture was also used in Classic and Sportscar magazine’s event report.

Another event at Goodwood brought out the Daytona the following weekend, this time for Supercar Sunday. I wasn’t really planning to go to this event since I was moving house that weekend, but as the GRRC (in conjunction with Toyo Tyres) had selected the car for part of the display outside the old control tower, I couldn't really say no! The offer of a complimentary (and very nice) breakfast also helped to convince my wife that we could afford a few hours away from packing and unpacking boxes.

I’ve covered most of the event already in our Spotted in the Wild Special, so here I will concentrate on the drive home as we followed a Ferrari F40. The speed limits on the roads around Goodwood can be frustrating when driving high performance cars. With frequent cameras and a strong likelihood of police speed traps in the area on a Supercar Sunday, both the F40 driver and I were religiously sticking to the speed limits, much to the frustration of the new Porsche 911 Carrera GTS behind us. Perhaps the frustration was that no-one was paying attention to his new Porsche with two sexier Italians in front of it!

The relatively gentle pace gave me the opportunity to study the aerodynamics on the F40 and marvel at how simple the design of the wing and rear diffuser looked compared to those on a 458. It is rather like comparing an F1 car of the late Eighties with one of today.

As we joined the A3 and accelerated down the sliproad, I was reminded that while the Daytona was the performance benchmark of the early Seventies, supercars had moved on considerably by the mid-Eighties. The Daytona may have had a small edge before the F40’s turbos had spooled up, but as soon as they were on-boost, there was no doubt the F40 was a much faster car.

I sure there is a space in my fantasy garage for an F40 (although at their current rate of appreciation, maybe the time to put a real one in the garage has passed), but I’m more than happy with the performance of the Daytona. Despite being nearly forty years old, it's more than capable of staying with modern traffic and showing a few more modern performance cars a thing or two. 

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