The Original Pitch
It was 1991. Correction. 1993.
Lord March—Charles Gordon-Lennox to his non-enthusiast friends—looked at his driveway in Chichester and decided it was a waste of potential asphalt. He invited a handful of people to run their cars up it. One-tenth the size it is today, but the ethos? Identical. Run what you bring. Provided you brought something worth seeing.
A classic that stops traffic. A race winner gathering dust. A brand-new piece of high-tech madness.
That was thirty years ago. Now? It is an absolute sprawl of horsepower and hubris. Yet, for all its expansion, Goodwood refuses to become just another static car show. Nothing stays still. Machines get whipped up that hill by drivers who are terrified of nothing but standing still.
You won’t find this elsewhere on Earth. Travis Pastrana donuts in a Subaru Brats. Three seconds later, Lando Norris screams past in a McLaren prototype. Followed immediately by an Andretti sliding one of the actual Le Mans-winning GT40s.
Automotive hero worship overload.
But here’s the twist. It’s remarkably accessible. This estate is older than voting rights, yet for $100 you can wander where Yuki Tsunoda wanders. You can watch rally cars turn forests into sandstorms. You can stand near hay bales until the downforce of a T.50 rips your hat clean off.
So what stood out this time? The 2026 edition was loud. Let’s talk about the noise.
Old Soul, New Bones
Bentley showed us “Car Zero” from their Blower Continuation Series.
It looks like a hammering accident from 1928. It wasn’t. It was built in 202. Laser scanned. Measured by supercomputers in Crewe. Then hand-crafted using period materials because data can’t replicate the soul of rivets.
Riding in it felt wrong and right all at once. The 4.5-liter four-cylinder engine rattled the leather seats so hard my teeth vibrated. Jonathan Smedley was wrestling the wheel, sliding the chassis past rock walls and through tunnels of trees.
Faster? Sure. Modern Bentaygas will crush this time. But can they replicate the fear?
No.
Bruce’s Lost Dream
McLaren was everywhere this year.
The 788HS debut was flashy. The MCL-HY hypercar for Le Mans looked menacing. We saw the new W1 race car, too. Lots of eye candy.
But we kept looking at the M6GT replica.
Most people have never heard of the original M6GT. It was Bruce McLaren’s attempt to make a road car. A street-legal dream that died before it began, buried by the tragic crash of 1970 that killed him. The car never passed the prototype stage.
Now? McLaren used scanning tech. New-old-stock parts from archives and, apparently, eBay. They dug up Bruce’s sketchpad and built the street car he never got to drive.
It’s haunting. And fast.
The Monster From Italy
There ain’t no replacement for displacement.
Ask Fiat in 191. Specifically, the team that built the Fiat S76. The “Beast of Turin.”
This thing was built to beat Mercedes at land-speed records. They chose an insane method of execution: a 28-liter inline-four. That piston is wider than your hand.
300 horsepower.
At 140 RPM.
That’s not an exaggeration. That’s low-rPM brutality. The engine was originally designed for airships, not a wheeled frame that looks like it might topple over in a breeze.
Seeing it is mandatory. You don’t just watch the Beast of Turin; you survive it.
The noise is physical. Bass heavy enough to override your heartbeat. Fire spewing from exhaust ports thick enough to swim in. The pilot looks less like a driver and more like someone riding a mechanical elephant, yanking at a tiller trying to steer a dirigible up a steep incline.
If you can hear it starting up in the paddock? You’re going to hate yourself for not packing earplugs.
The Electric Hydra
The hillclimb changes.
Electric vehicles used to be a curiosity. Now they’re a hydra. Cut off one record-holding McMurtry Spéirling, and three more pop up.
You don’t get the visceral skull-rattle of a Ferrari FXX going all-in on throttle. Not with the quiet motors.
But don’t tell them they lack soundtrack.
The Formula E car? It screamed at a frequency that woke every dog in Sussex. Ford’s Pikes Peak Mustang had its own ear-shattering wail.
Even the gas cars played it different. The Mercedes-AMG CLA45 and GT 4-Door Coupes didn’t roar—they smoked. Thick, lurid clouds of rubber tire smoke filled Lord March’s driveway while people stood there chatting about dinner.
The volume is dropping. The atmosphere is shifting. Times are changing, indeed.
Walk Around
The hill eats up your time.
But walk around. Put your feet on the grass. The paddocks are open. You can bump shoulders with a Formula 1 McLaren. Ten feet away? A vintage Porsche 917 sits in silence.
It’s an auto show, technically. Renault displayed new and old 5s. But there’s a chance here for American eyes to see metal they rarely encounter back home. BYD has a big footprint now. Other Chinese marques, too.
We usually ignore them.
At Goodwood, they command attention.
