In its heyday, make no mistake, the Goodwood Motor Circuit always occupied a very special place within the burgeoning British motor racing scene. It never hosted a world championship grand prix, but it provided a much-loved stage for the infant British motorsport industry to strut upon.
While active racing was pursued there for 18 years, 1948-66, the Motor Circuit’s subsequent test and sprint-only career saw it survive with little change – other than inevitably ‘crumbling around the edges’ – for a further 30 years, 1967-97. But then – due to the single-minded enthusiasm, enterprise and drive of the Goodwood estate-owning family’s scion, Charles March, now the Duke of Richmond & Gordon – would come Revival…
By contemporary international standards, Goodwood in period was only ‘a medium-speed aerodrome course’, yet a demanding one. Despite being laid out around the perimeter track of a wartime RAF fighter aerodrome, it was not pancake flat. It had gradient, it undulated and combined some very fast curves with tighter turns and, from 1952, its famous chicane.
Above all it occupied a beautiful setting. And as a wartime grass aerodrome its infield was not disfigured by concrete runways. Instead it was grass-green, pure-gold come harvest. Above all it promoted good racing.
Stirling Moss held that Goodwood was “of all the British aerodrome circuits the most rewarding whenever you got it exactly right”. In his opening race there, Event 5 of the 18 September 1948 inaugural meeting, his 500cc Cooper-JAP led the eight other starters from flag to flag, and he won by nearly half a minute – immense in just three, yes three, laps. Such fleeting short-distance racing had been staple fare at the pre-war Brooklands Motor Course. So that was Goodwood’s heritage.
But the British public just hungered for some fun, for any kind of sporting spectacle, and in the motorsporting sense that is what Goodwood provided. Over the following 18 years – with better funding, race distances increasing – Goodwood became a superb sporting stage, from members-only British Automobile Racing Club meetings, through nationals to internationals… and ultimately to frontline qualifying rounds of the world sportscar championship, 1958-64. So how did RAF Westhampnett, site of the Goodwood Motor Circuit, make that transition?
Source: Autosport