Not your average Fiesta

As more than 150,000 fans of a bygone age of cars and fashion descend on Goodwood for its annual Revival, Octavia Pollock talks to the Duke of Richmond about 75 years of motorsport on his West Sussex estate

- Octavia Pollock

I HAD my first driving lesson from Sir Stirling Moss at the Festival of Speed: brake into a corner and accelerate through, treat a fast car like a fast horse. I was 11 and we were at Goodwood House, where the then Earl of March had brought the roar of engines back to his West Sussex estate after a break of 27 years. It was his grandfather, the 9th Duke of Richmond, who had founded the grand tradition of motorsport at Goodwood, when RAF Westhamp- nett, the estate’s Battle of Britain base, was being decommissioned and Sqd Ldr Tony Gaze suggested that the 2.4-mile perimeter road would make rather a good racetrack. The Duke, a distinguished racing driver, leapt at the idea and, on September 18, 1948, the austerity of post-war Britain was lit up by the inaugural motor-racing meeting.

Some 15,000 people arrived, to a track with barely any fencing, wheat on the infield and an old Austin Six ambulance. Eighty-five drivers—including Moss, who won—contested eight races, heralding a countrywide resurgence of motorsport. ‘You have to consider it against years of rationing, a public deprived of spectacle,’ says motoring historian Doug Nye. ‘It is a beautiful place, below the Downs near the sea with salt in the air and the track is undulating, so has extra character.’