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 motor-sport at Goodwood, when RAF Westhampnett, 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
