Rhys Yates ready to rub shoulders with motorsport royalty at Goodwood SpeedWeek event

Rhys will join motorsport royalty, three-time Formula 1 champion Sir Jackie Stewart and four-time Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti as well as former World Rally Champion Stig Blomqvist, in West Sussex.

Coronavirus restrictions mean the usual hundreds of thousands of fans won’t be allowed to make the trip to watch.

Instead, SpeedWeek will be shown on ITV4 as well as being streamed live on goodwood.com, opening the event up to millions of fans around the world.

For Rhys, this week’s not just about one competition – he’s driving his Ford Fiesta Rally2 MkII in both the rally and drifting events.

“Everybody around the world knows about Goodwood,” said Rhys.

“It’s the summer’s biggest motorsport party – like Glastonbury, but with even better music!

“This has been a weird season because of what’s going on in the world right now and SpeedWeek will be a fairly strange event. To be at the Goodwood circuit, one of the most famous race tracks in world motorsport, with no fans that’s going to be odd.

“But it’s a real privilege to be competing there and competing in two events. The rally will be a lot of fun, I’ve got my brother James in alongside me, so he’ll keep me on the right track.

"And the drifting event is very much along the lines of the incredibly successful Gymkhana GRiD event which is run by Ken Block’s team.

“Doing both events, we couldn’t decide what to do with the livery. In the end, we went with a drift-oriented black RYR livery on one side and the same rally livery we ran when we won our class at the recent M-Sport Back to Rally Stages. It’s cool! And it’s very different.

“I did GRiD in Warsaw last year and really enjoyed it. Basically, you have to drift and spin the car around a serious of obstacles as quickly as you can. There’s a real skill in this, as well as the speed, it’s all about the precision and balance in the car – accuracy is everything. It’s really cool, give it a watch.”

The rally element of SpeedWeek runs today and Friday with the drift event set for the weekend.