Goodwood 2026: American motorsport, and the GT40 up the hill
The calendar says summer, which in this line of work means one thing: the world's best cars are about to spend a weekend sprinting up a driveway in West Sussex. The Goodwood Festival of Speed runs July 9–12, and after months of spy shots and teasers, we finally get to see a lot of it move under its own power. This year the hill has an accent. Goodwood is putting American motorsport center stage, and for a studio that shoots in the shadow of Palomar and lives on the same coast that gave the world Can-Am and Pikes Peak, that lands close to home.
The Rivals, and why America gets the hill this year
The 2026 Festival runs under the banner "The Rivals — Epic Racing Duels," a theme built around the grudge matches that actually moved the sport forward. Ford versus Ferrari. Senna versus Prost. Cobra versus Corvette. Rivalry is a good organizing idea because it's honest about how progress happens in racing: somebody builds something faster, somebody else refuses to accept it, and the cars get better in the crossfire.
The Central Feature sculpture out front — the towering steel piece Gerry Judah builds new every year on Lord March's lawn — has Singer as its partner brand this time, which tells you the Porsche world is well represented even in a year themed around American iron. But the headline is the Stars and Stripes. Goodwood timed it deliberately: the United States marked its 250th birthday on July 4, and the Festival kicks off five days later. The organizers are bringing a large contingent of NASCAR, IndyCar, Pikes Peak and Can-Am machinery up the 1.16-mile hillclimb, per Goodwood's own event coverage. For anyone raised on American road racing, it's the most interesting the guest list has looked in years.
The GT40 story Goodwood is retelling
The centerpiece of the American celebration is a car we've spent real time with a lens on: the Ford GT40. Goodwood is running the trio of GT40s that swept the podium — first, second and third — at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. That result is the whole reason the "Ford versus Ferrari" phrase exists. Henry Ford II got told no by Enzo, went home angry, and spent whatever it took to beat Ferrari at the one race Ferrari cared about most. It worked. The 1-2-3 at Le Mans in '66 is one of the cleanest revenge stories in motorsport, and sixty years on it still headlines a festival.
The GT40s won't be alone in flying the flag. Can-Am — the no-rules series that let McLaren and Porsche build the most violent sports-prototypes ever to turn a wheel — is part of the celebration, as is the sound-and-fury tradition of Pikes Peak, where cars claw up a mountain against the clock and thinning air. NASCAR brings the stock-car half of the American story, the door-handle-to-door-handle discipline that most of Europe still watches with a mix of confusion and envy. Put all of it on one hillclimb across four days and you get a decent argument that American racing was never the poor relation it sometimes gets filed as. It just spoke a different dialect of fast.
We keep the GT40 in the archive for exactly this reason — it's a shape that refuses to age. Our full-length GT40 frame and the GT40-and-Lotus pairing both live in the portfolio, and shooting that low, wide, impossibly flat silhouette teaches you something about proportion that most modern cars can't. There's no wasted height on a GT40. The roofline exists to clear a helmet and nothing more. When Goodwood parades three of the originals up the hill this month, that's the geometry the crowd is leaning in to see.
The machinery worth walking the hill for
Goodwood is never only a history lesson. The Festival has quietly become the place manufacturers choose to reveal cars in motion rather than under studio lights, and 2026's debut list is deep.
Toyota is bringing the biggest news for driving enthusiasts. The GR GT — the production sports car spun out of the GR GT3 racing program — makes its first undisguised, moving appearance outside Asia, alongside the track-only GR GT3 and the Lexus LFA Concept. It runs an all-new 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 hybrid targeting around 650 PS and 850 Nm, which means Toyota is answering the V8 question at the exact moment most of the industry is walking away from it. Seeing and hearing that engine on the hill, rather than reading a press release, is the entire point of Goodwood.
Around it, the debut list keeps going: a development mule of the next-generation, all-electric Alpine A110; Gordon Murray Automotive's latest T.50 and S1 LM variants; the 547-bhp electric Renault 5 Turbo 3E homage; and, for the "the future is loud in a different way" file, the 1,582-bhp Denza Z coupe from BYD's premium arm. CarThrottle's full rundown is the cleanest single preview if you want the complete A-to-Z. The through-line is variety — a 60-year-old Le Mans winner and a four-figure-horsepower EV attacking the same stretch of tarmac in the same afternoon.
What a hillclimb teaches a chase crew
Here's the part that matters to how we work. A hillclimb is a photographer's proving ground disguised as a party. The cars come by fast, once, in bad-for-you light filtered through English trees, and you either nail the frame or you wait a full run to try again. It is, in miniature, the same problem we solve every time we hang out the back of a chase car on a canyon road: a fast-moving subject, a fixed window of opportunity, and no second takes.
The fundamentals don't change between a Goodwood grandstand and a rolling shot on the 76. You drop your shutter speed until the wheels blur and the body stays sharp, you pan from the hips and let the car drag the frame across the sensor, and you accept that most of the run is throwaway to get the one that isn't. We wrote the long version of that in our guide to shooting a rolling shot, and everything in it applies to a car sprinting up a hill just as well as one cruising at 45 next to a camera rig. Motion is motion. The GT40s at Goodwood and the Porsches we chase through North County are the same physics problem lit differently.
That's also why the licensable archive leans on movement. A static car is a catalog. A car with the road smeared underneath it is a moment, and moments are what the classic-motorsport crowd — the people who fly to a hillclimb to watch a '66 Le Mans winner move again — actually want on a wall.
Watch from San Diego, shoot in San Diego
You don't have to cross an ocean to find the good version of this. Southern California has its own version of every Goodwood theme playing out on any given weekend: American muscle idling next to European exotica at a coffee meet in Carlsbad, a Cobra and a GT40 replica trading passes on a mountain road that most of the world will never see. The Festival of Speed just concentrates it into four days and points a camera at the best of it.
We'll be watching the hill from the West Coast, taking notes on how the light falls on those GT40s, and applying the same eye to the cars in our own backyard. If you've got something in your garage worth documenting the way Goodwood documents its history — moving, in real light, with the road underneath it — get in touch. We answer within 24 hours.