Goodwood Revival Celebrates Ten Years
As the Goodwood Revival celebrates ten years, some top reasons to visit the 2008 event.
This coming weekend (19-21 September) Goodwood will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the popular and unique Goodwood Revival. With the weather forecast looking very encouraging for the event, around 115,000 excited motor sport enthusiasts are expected to come to see their favourite star cars and drivers in action. After ten years, the Goodwood Revival is firmly established as the world’s greatest historic motor race meeting with a magical step back in time for all lovers of nostalgia.
This year is a very special one for motor sport at Goodwood, as not only is the Revival celebrating its tenth anniversary, but the famous West Sussex motor circuit is marking its 60th anniversary, since the very first post-War motor race meeting was held in the UK in September 1948. There are very many reasons to visit the 2008 Goodwood Revival – below are some highlights:
Anniversaries: As already mentioned, this weekend Goodwood will celebrate two important anniversaries at this year’s Revival; the 60th since the opening of the motor circuit by the 9th Duke of Richmond in 1948 to stage the UK’s first ‘properly’ organised post-War motor race meeting, plus the tenth since the first Revival took place in September 1998. It will be an action-packed weekend of historic motor racing and period theatre for all the family, encapsulating some the Revival’s most memorable moments from the last ten years.
As part of these special celebrations, Goodwood will recreate life on the road in 1948 when the circuit first opened, with a display of various modes of transport as used in 1948, ranging from cars to commercial vehicles, steam rollers, a milk float, and even a light aircraft.
To also help celebrate 60 years of motor racing at Goodwood, the Revival will feature a fabulous parade of those men and machines intrinsically linked with the circuit’s history. The Goodwood team will bring together as many significant cars as possible, whether it’s Reg Parnell’s Maserati 4CLT that dominated the first few meetings; or winning cars from the most famous races such as the Nine Hours, TT and Easter Monday F1 race; or cars that set important milestones – the BRM in which Stirling Moss recorded the first 100mph lap, or the Lotus and BRM in which Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart both set the lap record time of 1m 20.4 seconds in 1965, less than a year before the circuit closed.
Taking part alongside the cars will as many great International racing stars as possible from the Goodwood history books. Drivers such as Sirs Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart and John Whitmore will line up alongside Tony Brooks, Jackie Oliver, Richard Attwood, Derek Bell, Jacky Ickx, John Fitzpatrick, Jack Sears, John Rhodes, Brian Redman and Michael Salmon, to name but a few.
On Sunday the participants will be joined on the grid by a host of other guests with a Goodwood connection in period, such as famed entrants John Coombs and Alan Mann. The guests will share their stories and anecdotes, and then everyone will pause to remember the many great Goodwood heroes who are no longer able to be with us.
Evening Race: To mark arguably the most distinctive race in Goodwood’s history – and also to recreate one of the Revival’s most memorable tribute races – the Freddie March Memorial Trophy will become a 90-minute endurance race in 2008 for only the second time, extending into the dusk on Saturday evening. It will feature cars in the spirit of the original event, including Jaguar C-type, Aston Martin DB3S, Maserati A6GCS, Lancia D24, Ferrari 750 Monza, HWM and Lagonda.
The only previous time that the race has run to this format was in 2002, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the inaugural Nine Hour International sports car race in 1952. Special permission was granted to extend the racing longer into the evening than normal, bringing back to Goodwood the magical sight of 1950s sports cars racing in the autumnal twilight with headlamps ablaze, just as they did in the 1950s. It remains one of the most unforgettable races at the Revival to date.
The original Nine Hour International sports car race at Goodwood attracted the top works teams of the day, such as Jaguar and Aston Martin, plus some exotic entries from Italy and Germany. The race began at 3pm and continued to midnight, creating the evocative spectacle of sports cars racing from sunshine to sunset to moonlight, just as at the world-famous Le Mans 24 Hour race.
Along with the Easter Monday Formula 1 race, the Nine Hour race was Goodwood's flagship event of the season, establishing Goodwood as an International sports car venue and giving rise to the equally famous Goodwood Tourist Trophy when the nine-hour format changed to a shorter three-hour race. A complete programme of exciting wheel-to-wheel racing is also planned for the whole of the Revival weekend, including celebrating races such as the St Mary’s Trophy for saloon cars, and the TT, with over £85million-worth of beautiful sports GT racing cars battling it out, including Ferrari 250 GTOs and AC Cobras.
Car Displays: For lovers of pre-1966 vehicles, the Goodwood Revival is real petrol head heaven. Literally thousands of classic vehicles can be seen at the event, some displayed in very salubrious surroundings.
New amongst these is the BGC Earls Court Motor Show. This is a recreation of the classic London Motor Show, as held immediately post-War at Earls Court. Goodwood’s Earls Court adds an exciting new element to the Revival with an original Art Deco frontage reminiscent of the glory days of exhibitions of the past. This spacious new area will give visitors an insight into how motoring of the future might look from a pre-1966 perspective, with a display of ‘futuristic’ 21st century cars.
Each stand will be presented in the style of a traditional Motor Show of the 1950s or 1960s. As with the rest of the Revival, the overall display will not be set in a specific timeframe, but rather at some unidentified point prior to 1966. Manufacturer displays will therefore include contemporary cars of the 1950s or 1960s, as well as some ‘concept’ cars showing each company’s visions of what production cars might look like in the early 21st Century. Car manufacturers exhibiting at this ‘motor show of the future’ are Maserati, Jaguar, BMW, Ford and Rolls-Royce.
In addition to the manufacturers’ stands, there will be a central ‘concours d’elegance’ exhibition staged in association with BGC, the voice and electronic brokerage specialists. This display will commemorate ‘the BGC Fastest Production Car in the World’, featuring 25 performance cars from the 1920s, right through to the present day, all of which were the most rapid cars in production at a given point in time.
As well as the BGC Earls Court Motor Show display, a collection of classic Porsches will be shown at the Woad Corner showroom, to honour the Stuttgart marque’s 60th anniversary. The largest display of March-bodied cars ever gathered together in one location can also be seen at the Kevill-Davies and March garage and workshop. Goodwood Motor Circuit’s founder, the 9th Duke of Richmond, Freddie March, designed and bodied a number of vehicles during the 1930s, many of which will be on display. A huge gathering of classic cars can also be viewed at the Revival Car Show across the road from the Circuit, supported by Classic and Sportscar mag