The big news out of this year’s Festival of Speed isn’t a car. It’s a membership list. Goodwood has announced that its members’ club is crossing the Atlantic, and the first thing American enthusiasts can actually do about it is join a waitlist for a club that doesn’t open for another year.
Here’s the substance. At Goodwood, the Duke of Richmond launched the GRRC of America, the first branch of the Goodwood Road Racing Club to exist anywhere outside the UK. The parent club was established in 1998 and functions as the members’ backbone of everything Goodwood does in motorsport, including access to the Members’ Meeting. The American version starts in California, with activity centred in California and Nevada before any wider rollout. Goodwood says the club will launch in summer 2027, with Founding Membership opening in early 2027, and that American members will get reciprocal access to Goodwood activities back in Britain. The centerpiece will be a headline event at Willow Springs Raceway, billed as Goodwood’s first headline event outside the UK.
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Now the part worth being clear-eyed about. There is no published price, no confirmed membership structure, and no fixed date for that headline event on Goodwood’s own channels. What there is, right now, is a free waitlist that Goodwood explicitly says is the only route to Founding Membership when it opens. That’s not a criticism so much as a recognizable playbook: build the community first, sell the tickets later, and use “Founding Member” scarcity as the hook. Goodwood has earned enough goodwill over three decades that plenty of people will sign a blank check on reputation alone. Just know that you’re signing up for the idea of an event, not a date on your calendar.
The patrons tell you what kind of club this is
The three founding patrons are Sir Jackie Stewart, Mario Andretti, and Richard Petty. Read that lineup as a mission statement. Stewart is a three-time Formula 1 champion, Andretti is the only human to win the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, and a Formula 1 title, and Petty is NASCAR’s seven-time champion. F1, IndyCar, and stock cars, one name each. Goodwood is signaling loudly that the American club won’t be a single-marque or single-series clique. That matters, because the U.S. enthusiast landscape is deeply tribal, and a British import that reads as “European sports cars only” would land with a thud in a country that invented the stock car and the drag strip.
A crowded market and a smart venue choice
America already has a serious premium car-event calendar. Monterey Car Week, Amelia Island, and a growing roster of high-dollar track gatherings all compete for the same collectors and the same weekends. Goodwood is walking into that market, not inventing it, so the interesting question is how it differentiates. Its answer has always been theater: the mixing of eras and disciplines, the access, the sense that you’re inside the show rather than roped off from it.
Choosing Willow Springs over a marquee name like Laguna Seca is a tell. Willow Springs is a fast, old-school road course out in the high desert north of Los Angeles, one of the oldest permanent circuits in the country, and it has stayed relatively unpolished while newer facilities chased modern amenities. That patina is the whole point for a brand built on heritage, and the proximity to Los Angeles puts it within reach of both the car-collecting money and the entertainment industry that Goodwood has always known how to court.
Why a U.S. track event is harder than it looks
This is the part nobody in the announcement coverage will explain, and it’s where the real complexity lives. The Festival of Speed hillclimb runs up the Duke’s own driveway on private land, which gives Goodwood enormous latitude over how cars run and who runs them. A headline event at a licensed American road course is a different animal. Running priceless historic machinery on a real circuit in the United States means grappling with event sanctioning bodies, track-specific insurance, liability waivers for every driver, and the American litigation climate that makes all of that more expensive and more lawyered than the British equivalent. Vintage and high-value cars at speed also raise agreed-value coverage questions that a UK operator can’t simply port over. Goodwood even runs its own classic-car insurance arm at home, but a U.S. event is a fresh regulatory and insurance build from the ground up, and that complexity is a big reason the flagship event trails the club launch rather than leading it.
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The historical framing, for what it’s worth, is more than marketing. Goodwood is leaning on the 3rd Duke of Richmond, a supporter of American independence in the 18th century, and timing the announcement to America’s 250th anniversary in 2026. It’s a genuine thread rather than an invented one, which is more than most brand-expansion stories can claim.
The practical takeaway is simple. If you’re a Goodwood devotee, the free waitlist costs you nothing but an email address and locks in Founding Member priority, so there’s little reason not to. If you’re expecting a Festival of Speed to attend next summer, temper that: the club comes first in 2027, the big event follows, and the details that actually determine whether this is worth your money, price, benefits, and format, all remain to be published. Goodwood has built something singular in Sussex over thirty years. Whether that translates to the California desert is a genuinely open question, and the honest answer is that we won’t know until the cars actually turn a wheel at Willow Springs.
Shawn Henry