The DUKE’S FANCY
A weekend of top-class Historic road racing on both two wheels and four in glorious British spring sunshine on a circuit bedecked with Ukrainian flags, while raising a substantial sum of money for the Ukraine Disasters Emergency Committee, is a potent way of combining the nostalgia for yesteryear with compassion for those suffering today in the war with Putin’s Russia. That’s what marked the 79th Goodwood Members Meeting – aka 79MM – held this year on 9-10 April, which this time included two thrilling motorcycle races, each with a blanket finish.
Britain’s annual Goodwood Revival is widely held to be the world’s premier Historic race meeting for both cars and bikes. It’s been staged each September since 1998 over the 3.809km Motor Circuit opened in 1948 by the Duke of Richmond, and laid out on a decommissioned WW2 airfield, which the RAF had built on his Goodwood estate near Chichester, on England’s leafy South Downs.
Catering for machinery that would have competed at the circuit before it closed in 1966, the three-day event thrills an annual sell-out crowd of 150,000 spectators, almost all dressed in 60s-style period clothing. It complements the annual mid-summer Festival of Speed founded in 1993 by the present Duke, after he took over management of the Goodwood Estate from his father. Now a major event on the British social calendar, attracting a vast number of celebrities from both within and beyond the automotive world, this four-day Motoring Garden Party is built around a high-speed hillclimb held over the 1.87km driveway leading to the Duke of Richmond’s home, historic Goodwood House dating from the early 1600s.
