Shot! The BMW Centenary Sculpture

Gerry Judah’s central display at the 2016 Festival of Speed was his biggest yet, but was it size over substance?

I’m a huge fan of Gerry Judah. Each year since 1997 he has been the creative force behind the visual symbol of the Festival of Speed. His huge statues in front of the house celebrate an important milestone in a different marque’s history and are always the one thing I look forward to seeing and photographing the most at the event. The fact they are also manufactured in my hometown makes it even more special for me.

Over the years, some of my best photographs from the Festival of Speed have been of his central display, which apart from once in 2011 (when it celebrated the 60th anniversary of the E-type with a 28m high sculpture of the car) always includes real cars within the structure. Something else they always seem to do is get bigger and bigger and this year’s — created to celebrate BMW’s 100th anniversary — was the biggest yet.

Now big companies tend to find any excuse for celebrating a milestone and whilst BMW was indeed founded one hundred years ago in 1916, it was originally only a manufacturer of aircraft engines. In fact, it wasn’t until 1939 that the company produced its first car, so technically it was celebrating some twenty-three years early. But let’s forgive them that anomaly and consider their centenary sculpture.

The first thing to say is — as far as I’m aware — it is the marque, not Goodwood’s Lord March, who finances the statue and whilst it only gets seen in front of his house for four days, it usually ends up as a permanent structure somewhere else. 2014's stunning Porsche sculpture for example, reappeared outside the company’s museum in Stuttgart, albeit in a rather truncated form.

All are important to know about because together they clearly influence the end result: it must fit the marque, it must fit the location, it must fit the budget and it must fit its final resting place. The budget is never revealed, neither is its eventual home ever mentioned.

Apart from being designed by Gerry Judah, the other constants are the structure is manufactured by Littlehampton Welding, it is always positioned in the same location in front of the house and, as far as I’m aware, despite its size, the final design has never been leaked before it is unveiled at the Festival.

For the visitors, the sculpture is an impressive sight, but it plays a bigger role than that as it visually defines one year from another. In essence, it becomes the icon for the event. And while the marque changes from year to year, every sculpture from the very first to this year’s iteration has been borne of one man’s imagination.

And it’s beginning to show.

Recently there has been a sense of similarity, a feeling that you’ve seen something similar in the past. It was certainly the case this year. It may well have been the biggest sculpture to date. At 77 tons, it may well have been the heaviest, but it was also the least inspired, the least impressive and sadly, the least photogenic. What’s more, apart from accommodating three old BMW’s, it didn’t appear to have any connection whatsoever with the featured marque. And when I say it didn’t appear, what I really mean is any car company could have claimed it as theirs and stuck their models on it, it was that generic.

In essence, what it was was three large intertwined curves. Each tapered off at one end and accommodated a car at the other. But we’ve seen all this — or at least something almost the same — before, several times now. Not only was the concept similar, the fact it was finished in white made it look almost identical too.

Last year’s Mazda statue was white, so was the year before and the year before that. Only Alfa Romeo’s broke the mould as it was finished in red, as were the two cars on it. And speaking of that sculpture, its shape echoed that of Alfa’s famous cloverleaf symbol seen on the side of its most powerful models.

Beyond how they get the cars so precariously perched, one of the wonders of Gerry’s sculptures, particularly his most recent ones, is how they defy the laws of physics. Whilst he may boast “The enormous cantilevers balancing on one point needed the right elements to allow me to stretch the arms as far as I could take them” the reality was there was no wonderment. The base of the statue was colossal, rather than slender. Given the size and weight of the statue, it had to be. But its sheer magnitude was its biggest problem, at least in terms of photography: it was way too expansive. Its width meant it restricted how you could shoot it. To get it all in the frame, you had to include the house and with it anyone standing near the sculpture.

That meant virtually all shots of it were very similar. And if, like me, you focus in on part of the sculpture, there was another problem: two of the three cars were upside down. On previous sculptures, cars were placed at an angle where they looked like they were driving up or down the arm they were positioned on, but here two of them were inverted. I understand why. Turn them the other way and all you’d see was the structure they were sitting on and BMW wouldn’t have wanted that. After all, the cars were the legendary 328 Mille Miglia Roadster, the 1999 Le Mans-winning V12 LMR, and the Gordon Murray-designed Brabham-BMW BT52 Formula One car.

But by turning the latter two upside down to fit the angle of the structure, they just looked odd in photographs. To me, that was a huge error, demonstrating that no one, not Gerry Judah or BMW really had thought about how this structure would work photographically. Indeed, to make them look better, I turned most of my shots upside down!

I genuinely believe this was a lazy design. Too similar to many of its predecessors, impressive only because of its size and perhaps most damming, having no connection to the marque it’s supposed to be celebrating. As I’ve said, it could have been created for any car company, there was nothing about it that related to BMW. Bearing in mind it was all about BMW Motorsport, just finishing each of the three arcs in their colours of dark blue, mid blue and red, would have connected it to its sponsor and made it look very different from what’s gone before.

The night before the Festival formally opened, the structure was revealed to a select audience amid a big firework, light and laser show. The resulting pictures were the best images I saw of it as it looked so much better in colours. Only those VIPs invited to its unveiling saw it illuminated. Although, for the first time ever Goodwood shared images of the reveal before the event officially opened.

Unfortunately, both days I was at the Festival and whenever I was photographing the sculpture, the weather was overcast. Grey skies and not much sunlight, certainly didn’t help. It looks best against a blue sky, which annoyingly for me only made an appearance on the Sunday.

Speaking about the display, Lord March said “It feels a bit risky, a bit dangerous.”

To me, it felt quite the opposite.

Talking about the design challenge, Gerry said this:

“The hardest thing is trying to avoid any conceptual connection with that which I’ve done before. You have to break that connection, yet retain an overall spirit to the work that gives some sort of continuity.”

I agree with him, but I really don’t think he succeeded this time.

Next year will be the Festival of Speed’s 25th anniversary. We don’t yet know which marque will be commissioning the central display. All I hope is that its design is a lot more imaginative that this one, and that it makes for more interesting photos!

Behind the image: All these images were shot handheld with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and either the 12–40 2.8 Pro or the 75 1.8 lens. Shot at Goodwood on 24 and 25 June 2016.

Read my review of the 2016 Festival of Speed here

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