Goodwood Festival of Speed Is Still the Greatest Car Show on Earth—Here’s Why

The Goodwood Festival of Speed isn’t a car show. It’s not a race. It’s not a museum exhibition. It’s somehow all three at once, which is precisely why nothing else on the automotive calendar comes close to it.

Since Lord March (Charles Gordon-Lennox) fired up the first event in 1993 on his Chichester estate driveway, the Festival has grown into something almost impossible to describe to someone who’s never been there. You’ll watch a Formula E car hit a record-breaking pace followed immediately by a 28-liter inline-four from 1910 that sounds like an airship engine having an existential crisis. You’ll see Travis Pastrana drifting a Subaru Brat 30 seconds before Lando Norris opens up a McLaren hypercar prototype. You’ll brush shoulders with actual Andrettis piloting the genuine Ford GT40s that won Le Mans while Rowan Atkinson walks past eating a sandwich.

For around $100 USD, you get access to paddocks where million-dollar machines sit stationary, a hillclimb where those same machines run flat-out with legendary drivers at the helm, and somehow—improbably—it all feels democratic and remarkably accessible. That’s the magic Goodwood figured out three decades ago and hasn’t lost since.

When Modern Craftsmanship Meets Historic Vision

The real story at Goodwood isn’t just about the newest hypercars or the fastest lap times. It’s about cars that shouldn’t exist in 2026 but do anyway, rebuilt using laser-scanning technology and period-correct obsession. Bentley brought its “Car Zero” Blower Continuation Series—essentially a hand-fabricated replica of a 1920s racing machine built in 2020 using modern measurement tools and then laboriously recreated using historical methods. The engine? A 4.5-liter four-cylinder that vibrates the leather on your skin as you carve through a rock wall tunnel at speed.

McLaren went further. The British marque didn’t just show off its new 788HS limited-edition variant and MCL-HY hypercar prototype—they factory-recreated the M6GT, a production-car concept from the late 1960s that never made it past prototype stage due to Bruce McLaren’s death in 1970. Using original molds, archived parts, and new-old-stock components sourced from everywhere including eBay, they brought a dead dream back to life. The engineering is modern, the soul is vintage, and the result is something you can only see running up that hill.

This is what separates Goodwood from every other automotive gathering on the planet. Other shows display cars. Goodwood resurrects them, runs them hard, and lets you stand close enough to feel the heat.

The Beast of Turin Reminds Us What Excess Looked Like

Nothing illustrates the Festival’s wild eclecticism better than the Fiat S76—better known as the “Beast of Turin.” Built in 1910 to chase Mercedes’ land-speed records, this machine sits under an impossibly-sized hood with a 28-liter inline-four engine originally designed for airships. The piston rings are roughly the size of your belt. At just 1400 rpm, it produces 300 horsepower and sounds like a mechanical elephant having a nervous breakdown.

Each exhaust port belches flames. The acceleration is glacial by modern standards but the noise—the absolute, chest-cavity-rattling cacophony—is something no EV, no turbocharged four-cylinder, no electric hypercar can replicate. When it fires up in the paddock, you’ll regret leaving your earplugs behind. When it attacks the hill, you’ll understand why displacement-obsessed engineers in 1910 made decisions that would make modern regulators weep.

The Beast runs alongside a Formula E car that screamed a note so high-pitched that, according to eyewitnesses, every dog in England started barking. Goodwood doesn’t curate automotive history—it just lets history and the future fight it out on the same stretch of asphalt.

The EV Revolution Has Arrived (And It’s Fast)

You’d think a hillclimb built on the thunder of big-displacement engines would resist the electric onslaught. Instead, the opposite is happening. The quantity of electric vehicles at Goodwood has grown noticeably each year, and the competition results show they’re not just guests—they’re competitors. The McMurtry Spéirling broke the overall record, then wisely stopped while ahead. Ford’s Super Mustang—the Pikes Peak electric variant—wheeled its way up the hill with a different kind of scream. A Formula E car took second place overall.

You don’t get the visceral, soul-deep rattle that a Ferrari FXX delivers when it blasts past at wide-open throttle. But you do get something: a completely different kind of drama. Mercedes-AMG’s CLA45 and GT 4-Door Coupe wrapped the crowd in tire smoke while staying quiet enough to have a conversation. The automotive world is changing, and Goodwood captured that shift live, without editorializing, just by letting the cars run.

Beyond the Hill: A Festival for Everyone

The hillclimb gets all the attention, but Goodwood’s real genius is that it’s a festival first and a race second. The paddocks are open to the public. You can walk from a McLaren Formula 1 car to a Porsche 917 in 30 seconds. International automakers set up massive booths—Renault displaying both new and vintage 5s. Chinese marques like BYD get international attention they’d never pull at a traditional motor show. There’s a motocross park with flips and stunts. There’s art, die-cast models, motorcycle hillclimbs, and food vendors. The VIP parking lot alone is so exclusive that some cars there are rarer than machines actually running up the hill.

This democratic approach—where a $40 ticket gets you the same access as celebrities and professional drivers—is why Goodwood endures when other automotive institutions fade. It’s not gatekeeping nostalgia or locking up heritage. It’s inviting everyone to celebrate the absurdity, the obsession, and the sheer inefficiency of building machines designed to go fast or sound amazing or exist at all.

Why This Matters

The Goodwood Festival of Speed works because it refuses to choose. It doesn’t ask whether you prefer old or new, loud or efficient, practical or insane. It runs all of them simultaneously and trusts you to appreciate the contradiction. A 1910 airship engine against 2026 electric power. Hand-fabricated vintage continuation cars alongside hypercar prototypes. Drifting Subarus and Formula 1 legends and motocross stunts and art galleries and porridge vendors.

In an industry increasingly preoccupied with targets, regulations, and platforms, Goodwood remains a pure expression of why humans build cars in the first place: because we can, because we want to, and because the sound and the speed and the sight of a machine at its limit matters.

Sources: Car and Driver