Three days at the Goodwood Motor Circuit, 18 to 20 September 2026, run entirely in period. Jacket and tie for the Central Paddock.
Freddie March, the ninth Duke of Richmond and a successful amateur racer, opened the Goodwood Motor Circuit in September 1948 by driving a Bristol 400 around the perimeter road of his own wartime airfield. It ran for eighteen seasons and closed in 1966, too fast and too narrow for cars that had outgrown it. His grandson brought it back in 1998 as the Revival, on the condition that the whole thing stayed in period, and Ray Hanna marked the first one by flying a Spitfire down the pit straight below the height of the grandstands.
That condition is the fixture. Everything inside the gate is dressed to the circuit’s own eighteen years, from the marshals’ overalls to the signage and the fuel pumps, and the racing is contested by the cars that ran here when it was open rather than by replicas. It is the only historic meeting in the world where the paddock, the crowd and the grid all belong to the same three decades.
The 2026 Revival runs from Friday 18 to Sunday 20 September at the circuit outside Chichester. Period clothing from the 1940s to the 1960s is encouraged rather than required, and Goodwood asks that contentious uniforms and appropriated dress are left at home. The Central Paddock is the one place with a rule, jacket and tie for men and a dress or suit for women.