From the archive: Easter at Goodwood

Memorable Mondays

Easter Bank Holiday Monday has long been traditional for a spot of motor racing, and in the days of the Brooklands Track the BARC always held a meeting of short races on this day. When the BARC moved to Goodwood in the late Forties, it kept up the tradition of Bank Holiday racing, and in the Fifties there were some memorable Easter events. There was invariably a capacity crowd for the opening meeting of the British racing season, and Goodwood was one of those places where you simply had to be, in order to be part of the British racing scene.

Johnny Morgan, the BARC secretary of the time, usually managed to persuade some top entries into his series of short races, and the meetings often gave a foretaste of the season to come, even if only one works Ferrari or one works Maserati was entered. Easter at Goodwood was a feature of those far off formative years of the rising of the power of British cars and drivers in international motor racing — something we now take for granted with little thought to the struggle of the early post-war days.