This year I was lucky enough to be given a couple of free tickets to the Goodwood Festival of Speed by some friends of the family and not having been in a couple of years I jumped at them.

The tickets were for the Friday, the quietest (and perhaps best) day to go to Goodwood if you can only do one, so I took the day off work and headed down to Goodwood with my flatmate, Ken.

When we eventually escaped London traffic and got to Goodwood it was lunch time, but a quick burger and we were on our way up to the forest rally stage at the top of the hill. There was a WRC event on elsewhere in the world that weekend, so there weren't as many modern contemporary rally cars as the last time I went, or the star drivers, but there were still plenty of classics, including a Lancia Stratos.

We spent a couple of hours in the forest stage, watching the cars fly round and taking loads of pictures. The jump towards the end of the stage was great, but as ever quite hard to get a good vantage point for taking pictures. The festival happened amidst a heat wave this year, so the mostly-chalk stage was massively dusty.

With only one-day passes time was quickly getting on, so we headed back down the hill to the main marquees and pavillions.

It was clearly an 'austerity drive' year as none of the manufacturer pavillions were particularly lavish this time round, though Alfa Romeo (celebrating its centenary) and Peugeot did the best jobs.

I got another chance to drool over the most stunning car of the past couple of decades: the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. This is very definitely my current dream car. Alfa was also showing off the new Giulietta, which looks nice enough but I can't say I lust after. I'll be sticking to saving up for a second-hand 3.2 V6 Alfa GT I think.

The Peugeot SR-1 concept car looked pretty stunning, though the dashboard was a bit 70s sci-fi from what I could see peeking over the shoulder line (it was on a high stand).

Peugeot was really pushing the new RCZ to the full, though seeing it for real it looks a bit too much like an Audi TT. The sculpted glass 'cockpit' roof is a nice touch but seems like it's been toned down from the concept car I remember seeing a couple of years ago and other than that it's a bit bland.

I felt the main show-piece sculpture in front of Goodwood House was a bit poor compared to previous years as well. The cars involved were lovely of course (including my old fave the 8C), but I didn't get it. I read afterwards that it's apparently supposed to represent the Alfa clover symbol, but it was lost on me at the time.

Great fun

All of this is not to say the Festival of Speed wasn't fun this year; it was great fun!

The rally stage is always fantastic and catching a glimpse of Formula 1 cars blasting (or smoking) their way up the hill at such close proximity is something you don't get elsewhere.

The Style et Luxe concours had some stunning cars in it and I even ran into an old friend of my Dad's who was displaying his Maserati Quattroporte II. There was also a Maserati A6GCS which, apart from the slightly dodgy two-tone blue colour scheme, was beautiful and a load of Alfa Romeo supercars.

I think my favourite car from the Style et Luxe section has to be the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 Stradale prototype; just a stunning car.

Moving round from the concours we headed to the paddock where you can get right up to the cars that have been launching themselves up the hill at speed all day. It's a chance to see some amazing cars up close, as well as catch some famous names (for example, we passed Jason Plato and Matt Neal having a chat on the way in).

In the paddock I found one of my favourite cars from my childhood: Gabriele Tarquini's BTCC-winning Alfa Romeo 155. I had a couple of Duke Video VHS tapes of the couple of seasons when the Alfa 155s dominated the British Touring Car Championship when I was younger and pretty much hero-worshipped them.

By the time we had made our way round the paddock, the show was coming to an end for the day and the sun finally crept out from behind the clouds. This was probably a good thing as I still got a bit sun-burnt despite the cloud cover.

The Festival of Speed was great as ever, but it definitely confirmed to me that you need to take a couple of days to do it properly (we didn't spend any time watching cars go up the hill!) and that the rather large amount of money I shelled out two years ago to be in the Kinrara enclosure was also worth it, dress code and all.

There are more photos from the day in my Goodwood 2010 set on flickr. I also cobbled together some of the video I caught on my 5D during the day, which you can see below.