Author: Jack Stewart / Source: WIRED
Once a year, the bucolic grounds of Goodwood House in West Sussex, England, are consumed by the smell of exhaust fumes, the sound of engines revving, and an excited crowd of 100,000 people, all wanting a look at the special cars on show.
They gather here because Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, likes to occasionally open his home to host the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a celebration of all the history, the heritage, and the future of motor racing.This week, among the supercars, hypercars, and pure racing cars, Goodwood visitors will spot a low, black machine streaking in near silence up the winding driveway to the estate, which for the event is transformed into a 1.16-mile hill climb track.
“We’re pretty sure when the car appears, people will freak out,” says Rod Chong, deputy CEO of Roborace. And it will be the first machine to give the hill climb a try without a human in command, so there are some nerves. “We aren’t sleeping very well right now,” Chong says.
Robocar is an autonomous race car developed by Roborace, which is starting the world’s first motorsports series for self-driving cars. Its vehicle doesn’t have the constraint of keeping a human driver safe, so the design team—led by Daniel Simon, known for his work on Tron: Legacy—dropped the cockpit and whittled away the central spine of the vehicle. The wheels flare out at the corners, behind huge aero ducts.
Roborace first unveiled its car in February 2017,…
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