A Day at the Goodwood Revival – Without Seeing Any Racing (!)

Thanks to some less than pleasant weather, your correspondent’s day at the Revival was different than usual:

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been fantastically lucky with the superb classic events I’ve been able to go to over the past few weeks, and that luck has been aided and abetted by unseasonably and reliably warm weather. Unfortunately, the streak of luck with the weather came to an end for the Goodwood Revival, which experienced heavy rain for much of the weekend, including Sunday, the day I attended.

The result of what turned out to be a month’s rain in three days was car parks that in parts resembled ploughed fields, especially on the tracks to the parking areas themselves, and footpaths that were a minefield of puddles and mudbaths that got more and more churned up as the days went on. And so, for the third time in four recent visits to Goodwood, I broke my rule – well, more of a guide – of attending a classic event in a classic car by arriving at the circuit with three friends in…a Tesla.

Sadly, this meant not parking in the Revival Car Show area, but a decent number of visitors turned out to be braver than me – or alternatively, didn’t mind getting the wheels and wheel-arches of their precious classics dirty.

Meanwhile the day started with frequent heavy showers interspersed with brief dry spells that created crowding where there was cover and difficult conditions on the track – not that we saw much racing. To be honest, without grandstand access, for which Goodwood (unlike Silverstone) charges a significant premium, none of us felt much like standing in the rain – which it did for most of the morning – to watch it. I did, however, manage to catch up briefly with our esteemed editor, Mr. Ebberfeld, for the first time – it was very good to meet him at last!

I was not initially able to enter the paddocks –  I really miss the days when ViaRETRO was granted press passes; Goodwood is making it more and more difficult to get access to parts of the site without acquiring extra passes for this, that and the other –  but we did manage to sneak in while the pass monitors were otherwise occupied, so although we didn’t see much track action, we were able check out up close many of the wonderful historic cars that were to brave the wind and rain that day – let’s take a look…

The range of cars competing at the Revival is wide but quite specific in terms of age – from 1930 up to 1966. Many are extremely valuable, yet their owners – or their friends – drive them with undimmed competitiveness, which astonishes me every time. An Aston Martin DB3S, Jaguar D-type or a Porsche Carrera 906 – one of my favourite cars of all time – is worth seven figures in sterling, yet you would never know it from the way they are driven.

As well as D-types, other beauties competing in the Sussex Trophy included gorgeous Lister Knobbly’s and in the Goodwood Trophy for GP cars that raced between 1930 and 1951 were superb Talbot-Lago’s in their pale blue French racing colours, and a variety of Maserati’s and ERA’s among others that, even when stationary, evoked a bygone era when brave men almost literally wrestled their cars around circuits the world over.

In the touring cars contesting the St. Mary’s Trophy, American muscle in the formidable and powerful shapes of Ford Galaxies and Plymouth Barracuda’s would swap paint with more delicately styled and smaller-engined Alfa Romeo’s and BMW’s – judging by the improvised repair to the damage to number 22 below, clearly no quarter was given.

Mighty Lola and McLaren Chevrolets and Ford GT40’s would do battle for the Whitsun Trophy, while E-types, Ferrari 250 GT’s Aston Martin DB4GT’s and AC Cobra’s, including the infamous “Snake Eyes” would do the same attempting to win the Stirling Moss Trophy and RAC trophies. Maybe one year I’ll treat myself to grandstand passes after all…

Bonhams is the auction house of choice for the Revival, and there were some tempting morsels on offer throughout the price ranges. I’ve always liked the Aston Martin DBS – as driven by Roger Moore as Lord Brett Sinclair in the TV series The Persuaders – and the 1970 V8 example in the perfect period colour of Bahama Yellow sold for £149,500 including buyer’s premium, but it was lovely, as was the barn-find 1971 Maserati Ghibli, which remained unsold despite an apparently reasonable estimate range of £60-80,000, though the cost of bringing it up to full roadworthiness may have deterred buyers.

I’ve never been sure about the flat-nose conversions of Porsche 911s, but I did like the red 1986 930 Turbo, as did it’s new owner, who forked out £178,250 for it, and another Porsche – this time, the very last air-cooled Turbo to leave the factory – fetched the highest price of the sale, at £614,200. It was another difficult sale, however, with only 50 of 91 lots sold at the time of writing.

Besides the racing, the retail areas and auction, one of the great attractions of the event – certainly for me – is the Revival Car Show, the world’s greatest classic car park. My original intention had been to park my 280CE there, but I had been informed by the organisers on Saturday that tractors had been used to pull some cars out of the mud – indeed, I was advised not to take my car. Although the fields themselves were not too bad, the tracks leading in and out of the car parks were ankle deep in mud, which only got worse as cars arrived and left…I have a feeling that by Sunday evening a good many more cars ended up being freed by tractor…

Luckily, not everyone took the advice I was given and despite the conditions, which clearly impacted the numbers, there were still many interesting classics to enjoy, some of which had been driven over from various parts of Europe.

As usual, there were many Porsche 911’s, Mercedes-Benz SL’s, various Jaguars, Triumphs, MGs etc, as you might expect, but there were also some lesser-spotted – in this country, at least – classics that caught my eye, and are the type of classics that make my heart beat faster purely because of their rarity.

For example, a pair of Messerschmitt’s – one three-wheeled, one four – and I can’t remember the last time I saw a little 1961 741 cc DKW Junior 40S nor, for that matter, a DAF 55 Coupé, registered in its country of manufacture and in its national colour. Little seen – and in some cases, little known – gems like these were dotted all around the field.

Other uncommon classics in the UK include the blue 1968 Toyota Corona and the red Belgian-registered Bitter CD, parked alongside a pair of US-market Pagodas, and who doesn’t admire the elegant Bertone-designed Simca Coupé? There was a fine metallic blue French-registered 1200S at Goodwood. It was also a treat to see two what were once ordinary but now very seldom seen English family cars, a 1957 Vauxhall Cresta E (just three on the road here) in a lovely bright green with white flash and it’s younger sibling, a 1965 Victor FC in a darker green – according to howmanyleft.com, this is the only one remaining on the road in the UK.

From across the Atlantic, I’ve always been a fan of the long, clean lines of the Pontiac Parisienne, and there was a fabulous example of the massive ’64 Cadillac Fleetwood convertible but perhaps the rarest US car in the car park, and in RHD, no less, was the 1963 AMC Rambler Ambassador 990 in it’s original Concord Maroon; I’m pretty sure I’ve never previously seen one in the metal.

In between the paddocks and car parks we also spent a fair amount of time in the retail areas, resisting the urge to empty our wallets on some very cool stuff. So – we managed to make the most of an extremely unpromising start to a day that at one stage threatened to be a washout, and it turns out that it’s possible to enjoy a day at the Goodwood Revival even in bad weather and without seeing any racing. And of course, there’s always Goodwood’s excellent YouTube channel to watch the racing, but hopefully next year the weather will be better…