Goodwood 72nd Members' Meeting Announced
Goodwood has launched a new historic race meeting that will be staged next March and which will be a purely members-only event.
The announcement was made at this year's Revival festival by Lord March who added that the spring meeting, held over the weekend of 29-30 March, will be a "very British" event.
Titled the 72nd Members' Meeting, the aim is to continue the tradition of the 71 BARC Members' Meetings that were held at the Sussex circuit between 1948 and 1966. Exclusively held for Goodwood Road Racing Club members, tickets for the weekend cost £120.
Races at the two-day meeting will range from a one-make Bugatti race to F1 and sports cars of the Fifties and Sixties, plus – for the first time – a race for more modern machinery beyond the scope of the Goodwood Revival: the popular Group 1 racing saloons of the 1970s.
Lord March said the decision to run a new meeting came about because Goodwood is currently only using three of its allocated five noisy days each year.
"We don't want to do the Revival again," he told Motorsport News. "We want it to be different."
In addition to the racing, the meeting will feature track action from more modern eras including Formula 1 and Le Mans. With a nod to the new F1 regulations that are being introduced in 2014, the F1 cars from the previous turbo era, when cars qualified with 1500bhp, will be featuring; the long-tail Le Mans cars of the 1970s and '80s and the Group B rally cars of the mid-1980s will complete the programme.
The "very British" atmosphere that Lord March has promised will extend beyond the race circuit. Each visitor will be allocated a House when booking. Drivers can win points for their house through success in the races while members will be encouraged to get involved and participate in the many competitions and games to help drive up their own house points.
And if that wasn't enough old school-style antics for the members, they can also look forward to traditional food over the weekend, including toad-in-the-hole and jam roly-poly, or cottage pie and spotted dick. No mention of corporal punishment though.
