Goodwood Festival of Speed

A wartime airfield reborn as a racing circuit; Freddie March's 1948 gamble seeded a motorsport legacy that outlasted the RAF by decades.

Freddie March, the 9th Duke of Richmond, converted the perimeter road of the former RAF Westhampnett airfield into a motor racing circuit. Goodwood hosted its first race meeting on 18 September 1948, establishing the estate's deep connection with motorsport that would endure for decades.

Twenty-seven years of silence, all because the circuit could not keep pace with the cars.

After Bruce McLaren suffered a serious accident during testing, the Duke of Richmond decided the circuit could not be safely modified to cope with the increasing speeds of modern racing cars. Goodwood Motor Circuit closed for competitive motorsport. For 27 years, the estate's racing heritage lay dormant.

A private driveway replaced a racing circuit, and 25,000 people turned up anyway.

Charles Gordon-Lennox, then Earl of March and heir to the Goodwood estate, launched the first Festival of Speed. Rather than reopening the circuit, he devised something entirely new: a hillclimb up the 1.16-mile driveway of Goodwood House. The inaugural occasion attracted around 25,000 spectators and featured cars spanning the full history of motorsport, from Edwardian racers to contemporary Formula 1 machinery.

A new sculpture greets you each year; the last one never quite leaves.

Goodwood introduced the Central Feature, a towering sculpture positioned in front of Goodwood House that would become the festival's visual signature. Each year, a new sculpture is commissioned to celebrate a particular marque, driver or theme. The tradition has produced some remarkable installations, from a cascade of Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows to a Lotus suspended mid-air. It is the first thing you see on arrival and the image that stays longest after you leave.

One circuit, two complementary meetings: one facing forward, one facing back, together the twin pillars of historic motorsport.

Buoyed by the Festival's success, the Earl of March reopened the Goodwood Motor Circuit for the first Goodwood Revival, a period-dress meeting for cars that would have raced there before 1966. The two meetings became complementary pillars of Goodwood's motorsport calendar: the Festival looking forward, the Revival looking back. Together, they cemented Goodwood as the most important historic motorsport venue in the world.

Fans stood inches from live Formula 1 machinery; no Grand Prix paddock had offered that in years.

By the turn of the millennium, the Festival of Speed had become a key date for the motor industry. Major manufacturers used it to debut new models, and Formula 1 teams began sending current-season cars and drivers to tackle the hill. The festival's relaxed, open-paddock atmosphere offered something no Grand Prix could: fans standing inches from the cars, drivers signing autographs between runs, and an intimacy that the sport's own venues had long since lost.

Speed tells only half the story; on Goodwood's lawns, the car becomes sculpture.

The Cartier 'Style et Luxe' concours d'elegance, which had been part of the Festival since the mid-1990s, reached new heights as one of the most prestigious judged displays of automotive design in the world. Positioned on the immaculate lawns in front of Goodwood House, it brought together the rarest and most beautiful cars ever built. The concours gave the Festival a dimension beyond speed: a celebration of the car as art.

39.90 seconds, and the combustion engine quietly moved over.

Romain Dumas drove the fully electric Volkswagen ID.R up the hill in 39.90 seconds, obliterating the previous record and signalling a new era for the Festival. The run was a statement: electric power had arrived at the top table of motorsport performance. The record still stands, a reminder that the Festival of Speed has always been about what comes next as much as what came before.

Two hundred thousand visitors a weekend; not bad for what started as one man's hillclimb.

The 30th anniversary Festival of Speed drew record crowds to the Sussex Downs. The festival had grown from a single-day hillclimb into a four-day celebration encompassing the hillclimb shootout, the Forest Rally Stage, the Future Lab technology showcase, supercar launches and live music. Attendance regularly exceeds 200,000 across the weekend. What began as one enthusiast's vision had become the world's greatest celebration of the car in all its forms.