I'm a pretty observant sort of fellow. I can offer you three things — two very small, one absolutely huge — that I witnessed this week, all of which sum up the events or companies they were associated with.

First of all, looking back at another fantastic Festival of Speed, was the key slotted into the dashboard of the 1970 Porsche 908/3. It's pretty extraordinary that these things have keys anyway, but if you took a closer look at it you would see that its 'bow' (the bit you get hold of) had been drilled for lightness. It was typical of the Goodwood event that such details, normally at arm's length in a museum, were there for all to wonder at.

Also at the beautiful Sussex venue was one of man's largest mobile creations, the Avro Vulcan bomber. We'd marvelled at it at last year's Revival but here it was again, just as menacing and a testament to human ingenuity, now happily employed to entertain, rather than annihilate, us.

Finally, during a fascinating morning at McLaren on Tuesday, my eyes settled on the exhaust pipes of an F1LM. Hang on, there's something not quite right there, one's a fraction longer than the other. It was, of course, due to the offset of each bank of cylinders. Just an inch or so in difference, but clearly vital to the engine's performance.

That's attention to detail if ever I saw it, and with all the talk of the new car company "going the extra mile" for customer satisfaction and ultimate supercar performance, I comment: that's the easy bit, it's getting the details, however small, sorted out that count.

One inch down, 63,359 to go.

Steve Wakefield Managing Editor sw@classicdriver.com

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