Last Friday was my annual pilgrimage to the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
I’ve been going for many years, supporting different automotive brands along the way, and it has always felt like a useful barometer for the industry.
This year, one thought kept coming back to me. The rules have changed.
What was once a weekend has become four packed days, with Thursday and Friday now every bit as busy as the weekend used to be.
Temperatures were well into the mid 30s and, as anyone who has been will know, shade is in fairly short supply.
Fortunately, we had access to the Startline Club and a steady supply of cold drinks, which probably explains why I spent most of the day around the lower part of the hill. I didn’t even make it as far as Porsche AG or the rally stages.
Normally, I stay until they practically kick me out. This year, I left at six and missed most of the traffic, which tells you something about the heat.
Perhaps that shaped what I noticed.
The first big signal was Singer Vehicle Design as the featured marque outside Goodwood House. Singer takes classic Porsche 911s and meticulously reimagines them. Extraordinary work, certainly, but still essentially a specialist restoration and customisation business.
Twenty years ago, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted that.
The second was the scale of the hypercar presence.
There have always been exotic cars at Goodwood, but this year they seemed to dominate entire areas. Huge stands, major budgets and extraordinary performance figures.
They are incredible feats of engineering, although I found myself questioning their relevance beyond a tiny group of buyers and a much larger online audience.
Then there were the new manufacturers.
The BYD presence was impossible to ignore, with BYD UK, YANGWANG UK and the debut of DENZA UK all on one enormous and consistently busy stand.
What stood out was not simply the size, but the confidence.
These brands no longer feel like newcomers. They are arriving with the scale and ambition of established global manufacturers.
The way brands compete for attention has changed too. So much now feels designed for online engagement, sometimes more than for the people standing in front of it.
At one point, an Ed Sheeran lookalike drew a huge crowd around a stand. It wasn’t really him, but it worked. People stopped, filmed and shared.
Thankfully, some things still felt reassuringly familiar.
Ford Motor Company set the fastest time up the hill. Renault created one of the best stands around the Renault 5, Renault 4 and new Twingo, while MINI once again built something that felt more like a place than a product display.
That was my real takeaway.
Specialists have become headline acts. New manufacturers are taking the biggest stages. Hypercars are competing for online attention, while legacy brands are rediscovering the value of heritage.
The rules have changed, and Goodwood 2026 made that impossible to ignore.
Let’s hope next year is a little cooler.
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