Goodwood Revival

Motor racing came to Goodwood because the war did. A Battle of Britain fighter station was left standing idle when peace came, and its perimeter road was already the shape of a racing lap. Britain gained a circuit without anyone having to build one, and the opening meeting launched the driver who came to define the place.

RAF Westhampnett flew Spitfires as a satellite of Tangmere right through the Battle of Britain. The perimeter road running round the edge of the airfield caught the eye of Freddie March, the 9th Duke of Richmond. He was a racing driver himself, and had won the Double Twelve endurance race at Brooklands in 1931. The first meeting was held on 18 September 1948, and 85 drivers and a crowd of more than 15,000 turned up. Paul Pycroft's modified Jaguar won the opening race. Reg Parnell's Maserati 4CLT then took the Goodwood Trophy, the feature race that closed the day. Stirling Moss won the 500cc race in a Cooper-JAP by nearly 26 seconds, the day after his 19th birthday. He was far enough ahead that after two laps his father signalled him to slow down. Moss came back for fourteen seasons and won 22 of his 62 races here, including four of his seven Tourist Trophy victories. People came to call him Mr Goodwood.

Moss was 32, and the sport lost him not at a Grand Prix but at a domestic meeting, on the circuit he knew better than any other. The injuries kept him out for a year, and he spent that year finding out whether he could come back.

On Easter Monday, 23 April 1962, Moss's Lotus left the road during the Glover Trophy and hit the bank almost head on at around 110mph. The corner was St Mary's, a fast left-hander on the far side of the lap. He was cut from the wreckage, spent a month in a coma, and the left side of his body stayed paralysed for six months. The following spring he came back to Goodwood for a private test and decided he no longer had the instinct the job needed.

That decision is the reason there is a Revival at all. Goodwood shut rather than modernise, so the lap survived exactly as it had been in 1966 instead of being cut about to keep pace with another thirty years of racing.

By the mid-sixties the Lotus 30, the Lola T70 and the Ford GT40 were reaching speeds the aerodrome circuit had never been laid out to contain. The usual answer was a chicane, a tight artificial corner that forces cars to slow. The 9th Duke refused to put one in, and after a British Automobile Racing Club meeting on 2 July 1966 competitive racing stopped. Testing carried on, and in June 1970 Bruce McLaren was killed on the Lavant Straight when the rear bodywork of his Can-Am car failed at speed. For the crowds, Goodwood stayed shut for thirty-two years.

He could not get permission to reopen the circuit, so he proved the demand somewhere he did not need it. The crowd that turned up to a first-year meeting held on Le Mans weekend was the evidence he needed to keep pushing.

Charles Gordon-Lennox, then Earl of March, staged a hillclimb in the park at Goodwood House in June 1993. Cars ran one at a time against the clock up the driveway. It drew 25,000 people. The Festival of Speed has been an annual fixture ever since.

Nobody knew whether a crowd would dress up for a race meeting, and the request could easily have fallen flat. Most of them did it, and the period staging has been half the point ever since.

The first meeting was held on 18 September 1998. Lord March drove out in the Bristol 400 in which his grandfather had opened the track in 1948. Entry was limited to the types of car and motorcycle that raced at Goodwood between 1948 and 1966. The circuit itself had been restored rather than modernised, down to the signage and the marshals' posts.

It is the format that makes the racing. An owner has to go out and match what a professional has just done in his own car, and because the two results are added together neither half can be treated as a warm-up.

The name comes from a saloon car contest first run at the circuit in 1959. The Revival version arrived in 2006 and has been an annual fixture since 2009. Grids alternate between 1950s and 1960s machinery, so one year brings Austin A35s and the next a wall of Jaguar Mk2s, Lotus Cortinas and Minis funnelling into the chicane.

There are no floodlights, so the light genuinely goes while the race is still running. It is the one hour of the weekend when these cars run on their own headlamps, which is what those headlamps were fitted for.

The Kinrara Trophy is an hour-long race for two drivers sharing a GT car, a roofed sports car rather than an open one, built before 1963. Ferrari 250 GT SWBs, Aston Martin DB4 GTs and Jaguar E-types make up the grid, and the grandstands fill against the sunset. The first running in 2016 went to Joe Macari and Tom Kristensen in a 250 GT SWB. It has held the Friday slot ever since.

Twenty-five years in, the recreation had comfortably outgrown the thing it recreates. The 15,000 who turned up in 1948 had become close to 150,000 across three days, and more cars were entered than for any meeting Goodwood held when it was actually racing.

The anniversary meeting ran from 8 to 10 September 2023. It paid tribute to Sir Jackie Stewart fifty years on from his third world championship, marked 75 years of Lotus, and remembered Carroll Shelby in his centenary year.

Brabham is the only person ever to have won a Formula 1 world championship in a car carrying his own name, and nobody has managed it in the sixty years since he did it in 1966.

The 2026 Revival runs from 18 to 20 September on an Italian theme, La Dolce Vita. Brabham was born in April 1926, and up to 50 of his cars will run in tribute. Maserati marks a hundred years since Alfieri Maserati's Tipo 26 took its class on the 1926 Targa Florio, with more than 50 pre-1966 competition Maseratis expected. Barry Sheene won his first world title fifty years ago. The Barry Sheene Memorial Trophy, the motorcycle race run in his memory since 2003, is on the programme again.