Goodwood to spotlight F1 engineering icons at 2025 Festival of Speed

This year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed will mark the 75th anniversary of the Formula One World Championship with a celebration of the sport’s most influential technical minds.

Adrian Newey, Gordon Murray and Ross Brawn — all major forces behind Formula One's evolution — will be central figures at the event taking place from July 10 to 13.

The festival’s F1 tribute is structured around six storytelling pillars — prologue, pioneers, innovators, underdogs, champions and teams — with each tracing a different chapter in the sport’s development.

The innovators section, curated in part by Newey, will focus on those who’ve pushed engineering boundaries and redefined race car design.

Newey, now with Aston Martin after his tenure at Red Bull, has been a dominant figure in the sport for close to 40 years. His career includes more than 220 Grand Prix wins and 26 world titles with multiple teams. He’ll bring two personal cars to Goodwood — a Lotus 49, the machine that sparked his interest in motorsport, and a Leyton House CG901, a car he designed for the 1990 season that introduced several technical innovations.

Joining him is Prof Gordon Murray, the South African-born designer whose career began at Brabham in 1969. He quickly made his mark with designs such as the controversial BT46B “Fan Car” and later joined McLaren during its late 1980s dominance with drivers such as Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. Murray eventually moved into road car design, creating the McLaren F1 and later launching his own company, Gordon Murray Automotive.

His firm is the featured marque at this year’s festival, with a centrepiece display in front of Goodwood House and a collection of landmark vehicles spanning Murray’s 60-year career.

Also in the spotlight is Ross Brawn, who led some of the most successful technical operations in F1 history. He guided Michael Schumacher to seven world titles and famously spearheaded the Brawn GP fairytale run in 2009, when the newly formed team won the drivers’ and constructors’ championships in its only season. Brawn will showcase the 2009 BGP 001 at Goodwood — a car that set the cat among the pigeons. 

After selling his team to Mercedes, Brawn remained as team principal and laid the groundwork for the manufacturer’s dominant era from 2014 to 2021. More recently he served as F1’s MD of Motorsport, overseeing regulatory reforms and a push towards sustainability.

The Festival of Speed’s F1 celebration will also include more than 100 significant Grand Prix cars, with appearances by eight former world champions, including Alain Prost, Mario Andretti and Nigel Mansell.