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You join me live from the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

With the sun baking down and surrounded by the world’s best supercars, some of the latest concepts and the pick of competition cars from the past 50 years there really is no place that I’d rather be. It’s petrolhead heaven.

Tomorrow marks the first day of the 2009 Goodwood Festival of Speed and from what we’ve seen and heard so far, it’s going to be the best one yet.

Whether you’re a fan of classic cars, supercars, concept cars, Le Mans cars, F1 cars or rally cars, you’re not going to be disappointed. But what can you expect to see on Lord March’s estate this weekend?

Next weekend, I’ll be making my first ever trip to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. This is a pretty poor admission for any car enthusiast to make and sadly I can’t come up with a justifiable reason why I have never made the trip down to Lord March’s estate.

When my tickets arrived today, I found myself getting rather excited. Having only ever seen pictures of the festival in magazines, and clips on the TV, I always thought it looked too good to be true.

If the 2009 Shanghai motor show has proved one thing, it’s that it’s time to take the Chinese car industry seriously.

The products are now almost uniformly convincing, the reliance on joint-venture products and hand-me-down platforms is dwindling ever more rapidly, and copycat designs are no longer commonplace. There’s only one remaining stumbling block to Chinese companies becoming serious global players, and that’s branding.

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