Aircraft-engined Edwardian monsters returning to race at Members' Meeting

The hugely popular contest will once again form part of the Members’ Meeting race schedule at the traditional season-opening weekend, which next year takes place over the slightly later date of April 6/7.

Running at both the 74^th and 75^th Members’ Meetings, the S.F. Edge Trophy took a year out in 2018 but is back by popular demand for the 77^th edition, following a brace of enthralling encounters in ’16 and ’17.

Both races can be remembered for the duels between Mathias Sielecki in his Delage DH V12 and Duncan Pittaway’s GN Curtiss, driven by Pittaway in 2016 and Patrick Blakeney-Edwards the following year. The two cars finished within a second of each other on each occasion, Pittaway taking the spoils by just two tenths of a second at the 74^th Members’ Meeting with Sielecki reversing the score a year later, beating Blakeney-Edwards by 0.592 seconds.

While Pittaway may have not been in the battle for the win in the second running, he was still turning heads as he wrestled the mighty Fiat S76 around the 2.6 mile Goodwood circuit.

“The straight bits are fine,” explained Pittaway after his first session at the Motor Circuit in the ‘Beast of Turin’. “It’s just knowing how much you need to brake and how early you need to brake. You don’t want to end up going into a corner too fast or there’s not much you can do. It’s just making sure that the tyres stay on and that the car doesn’t fall over.”

Part of what makes the S.F. Edge Trophy so popular is what lies beneath the bonnets of the vehicles taking on the entry list. The 2017 running saw an almighty grid reach a mind-boggling 234-litres – at an average of 8.6-litres per car. To put that into perspective, the largest engines elsewhere at that meeting were found in the Chevrolet-engined entries for the Surtees Trophy – a paltry 5.7-litres.

The grid for the 77^th Members’ Meetings are still being mulled over by Goodwood’s Motorsport Committee, but it is as good as guaranteed that the S.F. Edge Trophy will be another race to remember.