The Rivals
For four days each July, the quiet lawns of a Sussex estate become the loudest, most gloriously chaotic celebration of speed on earth. This year, Goodwood is all about the fights that made motorsport.
The Story
West Sussex in July is usually a study in English tranquility — rolling downs, hedgerows, the gentle hush of a summer afternoon. And then, for four days, it isn't. The Duke of Richmond throws open his driveway, and the most extraordinary collection of machinery on the planet comes to scream up it.
Goodwood began in 1993 as a modest gathering. They expected two thousand people. Twenty-five thousand came.
Thirty-three years later, the Festival of Speed is the beating heart of the motoring calendar — part concours, part motor show, part rolling museum, part unhinged hillclimb. And for 2026, the theme is one every racing fan feels in their bones: The Rivals — Epic Racing Duels. The fights that shaped the sport, gathered on one hill.
This Year's Theme
The Fights That Made The Sport
Racing history is written in head-to-heads. Two drivers, two machines, one obsession. Goodwood 2026 pulls those duels out of the archives and puts them back in motion on the Hill.
It's a theme with two towering anniversaries at its centre — and both are the kind that make grown enthusiasts go quiet. Sixty years since Ford humbled Ferrari at Le Mans. Fifty since Hunt and Lauda tore each other apart for a world title. Both are being marked with the actual cars, running, on the hill.
The Great Duels
Ford vs Ferrari
The most famous grudge match in racing. Enzo humiliated Henry Ford II at the negotiating table; Ford answered by building the GT40 and going to Le Mans to break him. In 1966 the GT40 MkIIs finished 1-2-3. Goodwood has reunited all three cars from that finish — chassis P/1046, P/1015 and P/1016 — and they're running the Hill together. Sixty years on, they still look like a threat.
Hunt vs Lauda
The playboy and the machine. James Hunt and Niki Lauda spent 1976 locked in the most brutal, human championship fight F1 has known — a title decided by a fireball at the Nürburgring, a comeback that defied medicine, and a rain-soaked Fuji finale. Half a century later, it remains the benchmark by which every rivalry since is measured.
Honda's First Crown
Honda marks 40 years since its first F1 Constructors' Championship, won with Williams in 1986. The Williams Honda FW11 — that 1.5-litre V6 twin-turbo howling out of the turbo era — is running the Hill. Nine wins from sixteen races. The beginning of a golden age.
The Central Feature: Singer
Three 911s In The Sussex Sky
Every year a towering Gerry Judah sculpture rises on the lawn in front of Goodwood House. This year it honours Singer Vehicle Design — the Californian atelier, founded in 2009 by Englishman Rob Dickinson (once frontman of the rock band Catherine Wheel), that reimagines classic Porsche 911s in obsessive, jewel-like detail.
Three Singers — a Classic, a Classic Turbo and a DLS — hang suspended from a dramatic triple arch. Eleven cars in all appear across the event, including the public debut of the first-ever slantnose Singer. The Duke of Richmond himself opened the Hill riding shotgun in a 1991 DLS Turbo.
Dickinson: Singer, he says, grew up at Goodwood — a second home, and the scene of its most important launches over more than a decade.
The RB17: Newey's Last Red Bull
1,200 Horsepower And A V10 Scream
The car everyone came to see. After more than five years in development at Red Bull Advanced Technologies, the RB17 ran in public for the very first time on Goodwood's Hill — and the man behind the wheel on Thursday was Adrian Newey himself.
It's the last thing Newey designed at Red Bull before departing for Aston Martin, and it is gloriously uncompromised: a track-only hypercar with no road-car concessions and no F1 regulations to obey. At its heart, a bespoke naturally aspirated 4.5-litre Cosworth V10, revving to 15,000rpm, paired with a hybrid system. Combined output: 1,200bhp. Weight: under 900kg — less than some Suzuki Swifts.
In a season where F1 has abandoned the V10 howl, the RB17 brought it back to a Sussex hillside. Fifty will be built, at a reported £5 million each, with deliveries from summer 2027. Hadjar, Tsunoda and academy driver Alisha Palmowski share the driving across the weekend.
Red Bull didn't come alone, either: the championship-winning RB9 — 13 wins from 19 races in 2013, Vettel's fourth title — also runs the Hill, alongside a static display of the team's most-loved liveries, from the RB1's debut colours to the RB21's Japan livery.
Cars You Have To See
The Hill's Headline Acts
The Hill In Numbers
The bricks lining the startline are a century old — a gift from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway “Brickyard” in 2011 to mark its centenary.
Beyond The Hill
What Else Is On
Give me Goodwood on a summer's day and you can forget the rest.
Why It Still Matters
Motor shows are dying. Halls of static cars behind velvet rope don't move anyone anymore. Goodwood survives — thrives — because it puts the machines in motion. A 1935 Auto Union record car and a 308-mph electric hypercar climb the same driveway. A pre-war Bugatti idles next to a fan car that could beat an F1 machine to the top.
And the theme is the point. “The Rivals” isn't nostalgia — it's a reminder of what makes racing matter. Not lap times. Not aero regulations. Two people who cannot bear to lose to each other. Ford and Ferrari. Hunt and Lauda. Senna and Prost. And, right now in 2026, a teenager in a Mercedes and the two British veterans hunting him down.
The names change. The hill stays the same.
If you love cars — any cars, from any era — Goodwood is the one weekend a year you owe yourself.
Nowhere else lets you stand a few feet from a Le Mans-winning GT40, then watch a 3,000-horsepower electric hypercar detonate up a country driveway an hour later. It's a rolling museum with the volume at eleven, and it's the closest thing motorsport has to a family reunion.
2026's rivalry theme lands especially well. In a season where the F1 championship has just cracked wide open into a three-way scrap, Goodwood reminds us why we watch at all. Not for the cars. For the fights.
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