- The Goodwood Revival celebrates cars and fashion from the 1930s to the 1960s
- An 80-year anniversary parade of D-Day honors WWII on the track in southern England
- With 16 races and more than 150,000 attendees from around the world, the Goodwood Revival is an automotive event like no other
The best things are hard to capture with words. The way a V-8 engine thrums in your chest. The intoxicating thrill at the limits of speed. The totality of the Goodwood Revival. It’s so much more than vintage motorsports lapping around a post-World War II costume party.
It’s a spectacle like no other. Helicopters chop into the infield of the legendary 2.4-mile track in West Sussex, England, where a parade of 1960s-era Meyers Manx dune buggies driven by counterculture castoffs kick off the mornings of the three-day gala. There’s no conscientious objecting taking place on the infield, where WWII aircraft such as the Supermarine Spitfire stand at attention as if still protecting Britain from Nazi attacks.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
Goodwood Revival racing
The contrasts of time and place don’t stop there. Stroll the paddock to drink in the fluids and fuels (sustainable this year, for the first time) of the participants of the 16 races. Count 17 if you include the children queuing up their 1950s pedal cars built so long ago by disabled veterans. It’s simultaneously cute and poignant. Race cars and motorbikes from the 1930s through the 1960s attract more than 150,000 attendees from all over the world.
The vehicles are invited to return each year, as long as they’re not modified beyond roll cages and other safety measures. Owners tap the world’s finest drivers, retired or active, including this year Jake Hill, Romain Dumas, and Dario Franchetti. Coming out of Lavant Straight in the notoriously fast track, into lethal Woodcote corner, then into the chicane where spectators pack the grandstands, the rain streams down.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
“There’s no grip anywhere—just like an ice rink,” racer Will Nuthill says from the podium, after winning race 10, the Richmond and Gordon trophy, in a 1960 Cooper Climax T53.
The finest of many excellent races, the Club TT Celebration, pits two-man teams in a one-hour closed cockpit race of GT cars and prototypes. AC Cobras muscle around Jaguar E-Types, a Bizzarrini and Porsche 904 better suited for endurance racing try to keep up. The race thrills, with a TVR Griffith 400 piloted by Tom Ingram overcoming a huge deficit and using all of the track and some of the infield to overtake Jake Hill and his 1964 AC Cobra. The crowd gasps, cries, cheers, celebrates.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
The racing is but one part of the attraction.
At one of six stages, a band plays swing and couples swing their partners, children perform numbers from “The Sound of Music,” acapella groups doff caps and croon to crowds, candy stripers and cigarette girls and flirts dressed as nuns entertain groups to raise funds for charity or just to have fun. Men await a straight-razor shave at the barbershop in the middle of the grounds, people try on mechanics’ coveralls, vendors sell racing memorabilia, a theater promises an immersion back in time, a ferris wheel in the distance beckons families; beers slosh, cocktails clink, and champagne flows with breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
The world’s coolest classic car show
In what must be the world’s largest car show, attendees descend on the Revival in their vintage cars, parked in the mud between the ferris wheel and the campgrounds, far removed from the roar of the track. A bloke with a thick foreign accent, pauses from clicking the two cameras slung over his shoulders.
“I can’t believe it. In one place. It’s too much!” We laugh, sign off, carry on.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
A 1950s Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn overshadows an Austin Healey Sprite that hides beside a crank-start Austin Seven. Inexplicably, the Silver Dawn is free of mud. Someone brought a rag or three. Because this is Goodwood, home to Rolls-Royce bespoke manufacturing since 2003, million-dollar Rolls are as common as Jaguar E-Types, their rounded rears seeming to sink in the sodden sod as their long noses lurch up, as if ready to launch. Here’s an Alpine Sunbeam roadster, there a yellow Ford Cortina with yellow fuzzy dice and yellow dice valve caps, and beyond, a row of 911s, their round headlights peeking out as if inching up on the grid. T
here a BMW 635 with a wiper for each of its quad headlights, Morgans, a Ferrari 328 GTB with as much mud on the rockers as decals on the rear, a white Lotus Esprit wedged into line, its design as questionable in timelessness as trickle-down economics. The VW Buses and Bugs, so many Land Rovers, so many post-war era originals—how did they get here?—MGs hiding behind a Cadillac Eldorado, an orange whale beached in the mud, American excess at its most egregious.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
My first love, my enduring love, an Aston Martin DB4—Bond, James Bond—overshadowed only by my new love, my enduring love, the 1970s DBS, a European fastback muscle car with more presence than Christmas Eve. A few American muscle cars represent, an Olds Super 88 beside a rare 1963 Corvette split-window. My goodness, only here could that be overlooked.
Two guys walk by, animated and overwhelmed, as if their flat caps might pop off with excitement.
“We ain’t seen them,” one guy says, pointing with his beverage. “We ain’t seen them.”
“There’s another entrance over there,” his mate replies.
“We ain’t seen them.”
Yup. It’d be impossible to see them all.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Robert Duffer
Yet amid all this historical and mechanical marvel, are the people, the English in the mist. Picnicking under tents or in the open, the intermittent drizzle a fact of life, unflappable, as if they stepped out of a fashion magazine from the ’50s, in tweed, pinstriped, and worsted suits, their Trilbys and their Tremonts keeping the moisture off their faces, the women tucked into their poodle or polka-dotted skirts, pin-up dresses cinched with wide belts, sipping on tea and snacking on cakes as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The period attire brings history to life and turns us all into travelers of both time and space.
The attendees appear to encapsulate every demographic imaginable, from wrenchers covered in oil and wannabes grizzled with the grime of raceday, children chasing after their parents, veterans escorted by solemnity, the rich and poor, the privileged more than the penurious, the young and the old, countrymen and continental strangers celebrating the most unique automotive event in the world.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
“It’s mad, init?” Says a retired Ford engineer, a native Brit living in Germany who drove over his 1972 Mustang in the rain and the dark to make his first Revival. We stand near the chicane before the grandstand, marveling.
That contrast, a British expat living in Germany and working for an American car company, wearing bell bottoms soaked to the Rolling Stones tongue patch on his calf, mirrors the smile of mine. You couldn’t smack it off our faces.
That only describes the first impression of my first, and hopefully not last, visit to the Goodwood Revival. To understand its scope, a brief history lesson is in order.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
The Goodwood Revival: A brief history
When in England, you cannot escape the past. Unlike Americans, most Britons embrace it, much like the Duke of Richmond.
The latest and most enduring iteration of the dukedom of Richmond began with a sordid, contrary appointment of Charles Lennox, the illegitimate son of King Charles II and his French mistress, in 1675. Fast forward to 1948, when the ninth Duke, Freddie March, brought motorsport to Goodwood after the second World War. From 1948 to 1966, Goodwood Motor Circuit reigned as the pinnacle of British motorsport, attracting the world’s best drivers, including Stirling Moss and Jim Clark, the lap record holder, to name but a few. March himself was a Brooklands winner. The legendary circuit closed in 1966 because owners did not want to add more chicanes to slow down the notoriously fast track for the high-horsepower race cars of the then-modern era. There were track days and practice sessions, but a dark cloud hung over Goodwood in 1970, when engineer and racer Bruce McLaren, yes, of McLaren F1 fame, crashed his M8 D Can-Am race car on the Lavant Straight and died.
The longest of three long straights on a track shaped kind of like an inverted Iberian Peninsula is known more for its speed than its technical points, except for Woodcote corner out of Lavant, where most wipeouts occur.
In 1998, the Duke’s grandson, Charles March, or the 11th Duke of Richmond, celebrated 50 years since the inception of when Goodwood Motor Circuit first ran. It was called the Goodwood Revival, counterpart to the Goodwood Festival of Speed themed hill climb that runs in July. The period dress code initially applied to staff only, but participants soon embraced it until it became the norm. It has since become the most venerated automotive spectator event in the world, but it’s not without its solemnity.
2024 Goodwood Revival, photo by Michael A. Shaffer of CapitolSunset.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,” the Duke of Richmond channels the words of Winston Churchill as the track falls silent in a stirring tribute to the 80-year anniversary of the European liberation from Nazi Germany. There are so many Germans in attendance. So many Spitfires from the Royal Air Force populating the infield. So many people dressed in fatigues of drab olive and khaki wool.
We can all get along, united by motorsport.
Between races on Sunday, with the first sun of the weekend peeking out of the blustery English skies, the tarmac drying for the first time since racing commenced on Friday night, a parade of more than 200 WWII military vehicles loops the track. The Duke says the vehicles represent but “one half of one percent” of all the massive mechanical force required to change the course of history. Two cannon blasts, a minute of silence, tears in the eyes of onlookers.
Never forget. The message resonates with as much force now as then.
The 2025 Goodwood Revival will run from Sept. 12-14, with tickets ranging from 89 pounds to 269 pounds.
Subaru paid for airfare, lodging, and the experience of a lifetime.
