Biggest ever celebration of F1 to headline the 2025 Festival of Speed

Goodwood will utilise its unique position in global motorsport to curate the definitive celebration of F1’s history, bringing together many of the sport’s biggest names for an event like no other.

F1 will take its place at the very centre of the Festival of Speed in 2025, as legendary drivers, teams, cars and more are expected to descend on the Goodwood Estate as we pay tribute to their achievements.

We mentioned this is set to be the largest celebration ever held at the Festival of Speed, with a scale to match the storied 75-year history of the F1 World Championship. More than 80 cars are set to make up over half of the action on the Goodwood Hill, while the surrounding areas will also be transformed to make room for this monumental spectacle.

The Festival of Speed’s main paddock, which traditionally includes the F1 Pit Lane, will be redesigned to accommodate an F1 takeover and transform the central area of the Festival of Speed into a hive of F1 activity. It will remain an entirely accessible area of the event, where fans can expect to get closer to their favourite cars and drivers than anywhere else in the world, a staple of the Festival of Speed experience.

It’s a celebration that inspires the overall theme of the Festival of Speed in 2025: ‘The Winning Formula: Champions and Challengers’, and one that encompasses multiple facets of F1’s history.

The showcase will be split into six overarching categories that tell the story of the pinnacle of motorsport, from the earliest days of pre-world championship Grand Prix racing to the modern juggernaut of business and technology.

These classes will be the Prologue, which will offer a closer look at the origins of the Manufacturers’ World Championship which ran from 1925-1927, and the subsequent European Drivers’ Championship held throughout the 1930s, which were both sanctioned by the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR), the forerunner to the FIA.

Then we have the Pioneers, which will showcase the beginnings of the F1 World Championship and the cars that helped to shape the sport’s first decade and set the tone for its future. A baton that was picked up by F1’s numerous Innovators, who continuously moved the goalposts of design, technology and performance, and harnessed evolving philosophies to keep F1 at the very forefront of automotive development. Some were more successful than others, but each was bold and ambitious.

It of course wouldn’t be the Festival of Speed without a substantial celebration of F1’s greatest cars and drivers, and in 2025 the Hill will be rammed with Champions. Thirty-four drivers have claimed the F1 Drivers’ Championship in 75 years, while 15 teams have won the Constructors’ title since its inauguration in 1958. Expect a substantial part of the F1 festivities to be centred around the sport’s greatest.

Those champions of course carry the gravitas of major honours, but it’s the Underdogs of F1 that exhibited the resilience and ingenuity to pull off many of the sport’s most memorable moments. While yes, the greatest teams and drivers are rightfully those remembered in the history books, we can’t help but look back at the more romantic stories with fondness and respect.

Finally, it would be impossible to hold the biggest ever celebration at Goodwood without embracing the Current F1 Teams, who continue to push the boundaries of potential in motorsport with ever more intricate design ideas honed with meticulous attention to detail in search of every last thousandth of a second.

F1 has always taken a central position at the Festival of Speed, which has hosted a long list of legendary names from the sport’s 75-year history. Most recently Goodwood has welcomed Red Bull to celebrate its own 20-year anniversary, with Max Verstappen headlining the action on the Hill, while Sebastian Vettel came to play in 2023 with two of his cars, an ex-Nigel Mansell Williams FW14B, and Ayrton Senna’s McLaren MP4/8.

Mansell himself received the adoration of the Festival of Speed in 2022, as ‘Mansell Mania’ returned in front of the House. “I feel like I’ve just won a race,” he said at the time. “I cannot believe it’s 30 years ago and I just feel so proud and privileged to stand here.”

The list of champions that have attended over the past 30 years is long, the likes of Sir Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso, Damon Hill, Mika Häkkinen and Niki Lauda have all been featured on the Hill, but 2025 promises to be the very greatest year of them all. 

The Festival of Speed takes place from Thursday 10^th-Sunday 13^th July 2025. Tickets are on sale now, and you can save by completing your order before the early bird window closes.

Main image photography by Tom Baigent.

Article images courtesy of Motorsport Images.