New supercars and hot hatches making fast and furious Goodwood entrances

A whole host of new supercars and hot hatches are queuing up to blast onto the Goodwood Festival of Speed scene on the weekend of 11 – 13 July 2008 – 13 days before the British Motor Show gets under way - some of which have never been seen in the metal before in the UK. Well, this side of the Nurburgring circuit, the car manufacturers’ secret test facilities or a pixilated PC image that is.

For those of you who filled the back of your English text book in 1988 with feverish doodles of what a perfect super car (future tense) should look like, you’re in for a treat at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, as a smattering of what looks just like them are going to leap off the lined, yellowed pages and appear before your eyes.

New supercar kids on the block making either their World or UK debuts will include the 400bhp 6.0-litre Breckland Biera V8, 300bhp 3.5-litre Ginetta G50 V6, 725bhp 5.4-litre Ford Shelby GT500 Super Snake V8, 500bhp 2.4-litre Ariel Atom 500 V8, 480bhp 3.8-litre Nissan GT-R V6, 1001bhp 8.0-litre Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Hermes and the 300bhp 3.6-litre Artega GT V6.

Elsewhere, concept cars which better educated and bigger kids roughed out only a couple of years back will be present in newly-pressed metal guise. Like the staggeringly beautiful Aston Martin V12 Vantage RS, Zagato’s horrendously plagiarized Bentley Continental GTZ, the Warner Brothers-esque Mazda Furai, the Lost in Space-inspired Guigaro Quaranta, the all-things-remaining-bright-and-beautiful 300bhp electrically-charged Tesla Roadster and the comprehensively certifiable KTM X-Bow.

The new hot hatch gang is being well represented in the Goodwood playground this year too, with a triumvirate of testosterone-rousing troublemakers stamping up and down, and leaving ADHD treaded imprints all over the show.

White hot hatches set to be sizzling in an automotive glow on the weekend include the brand new Toyota Aygo Crazy, Volkswagen Scirocco GT24 and Fiat 500 Abarth 595 Assetto Corsa amongst others.

A New Supercar and Hot Hatch Close Up

The 200bhp 1.8-litre VVTI Toyota Aygo Crazy is an interesting art lesson in what could well have happened when someone took too many puffs on certain, fruity smelling roll-ups behind the bike sheds at break.

The spaced out 500bhp 2.4-litre Ariel Atom 500 V8 is akin to the sketchy result of a bang on the head, rendered by the high school jock’s speeding basketball that left the would-be car designer briefly unconscious, before coming round and penciling something this Atomic.

The angular 480bhp 3.8-litre Nissan GT-R may be uncorrupted by silly curvatures, but its essential elements perhaps came about in the aftermath of blissfully ignoring the wisdom that comes with mature teacherdom, and thus the fledgling design bod having sipped on that repugnant, hubbly-bubbly liquid flowing over from the science lab test tubes.

The 325bhp 2.0-litre T FSI Scirocco GT24 learnt nothing whatsoever in the classroom, and went straight into the world of hard labour. What we see now is a stripped out new Scirocco coupe that’s had its interior furnishings ripped out and replaced with scaffolding. However, the type of builders who’ve been in might only have left the front two seats in place - complete with a set of race harnesses - but looking closely and the twin-clutch DSG transmission joystick-controller can be made out. The missing link that establishes the driver’s involvement with the 325bp 2.0-litre VW T FSI power plant. Education is over-rated.

The Fiat Abarth is dragging its 197bhp ‘take’ on the 1.4-litre T-Jet turbo-charged lump, kicking and a screaming to Goodwood, itself a victim of some dodgy interior renovations that leaves not that much more comfort for your creature bits than the rudimentary fixtures and fittings that lawfully qualify it as a road-legal car. Which we guess is all you really need to get you on your way in a motoring life anyway.