Goodwood Festival of Speed Sculptures

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is an annual event celebrating the diverse history of motor-sport. Every year since 1997 a brand new centrepiece sculpture, featuring famous cars, is created inspiring awe and delight in the many visitors to the festival at Goodwood House in West Sussex. Littlehampton Welding Ltd have fabricated and installed all of these structures every year from 2004 to the present day establishing a good working relationship with the designers and engineers of all of these creations.

For the 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Littlehampton welding were asked to fabricate and install a record-breaking 50 metre long cantilever sculpture, designed, fabricated, and constructed on the engineering principle of Tensegrity – where a strong and rigid structure is formed through tension and opposing forces, resulting in something of great size with relatively minimal mass.

The base frame, painted in the Lotus green and yellow colours, was erected to hold the main structure that was made from various sizes of steel tube and intersecting steel cable.

Each section was then carefully assembled and then lifted and held in position until the time came to release the supports, allowing the piece to rest naturally and hold shape under its own weight.

The design of the new Lotus Evija, was the inspiration for the shape of the sculpture designed by Unit9 Productions, mimicking the “rooster-tail” shape of the recently launched supercar. Then for the release of the car during the Goodwood Festival of speed Unit9 had developed an Augmented Reality App that allowed users to visualize the most iconic Lotus supercars, and the Evija, racing around the sculpture at speed.

Format Engineers helped develop the piece using computer-based form finding techniques, a script that would calculate the distribution of the steel in order for it to hold its own weight.