You see the Revival at Goodwood for example has a very definite definition of what can race. Our season closer has, for over 20 years now, recreated one very specific period of history, locking the Revival to cars that competed up until 1966, and nothing later. But if you move to the Members’ Meetings earlier in the year, you’ll find much later cars on track, and in our high-speed demos we’ve even seen some cars on track that only recently became obsolete with regulation changes. In fact our LMP demo included some cars (an Alpine-badged LMP2 for example) which were racing up until fewer than five years ago.
If you move into the wider world, there is a growing movement to find places for the cars that raced through the 1990s, and into the 21st century. Peter Auto and Masters Historic racing both run competitions for such cars, focusing on brilliant machines like Bentley’s Speed 8, Panoz Esperante, even the mighty DBR9s that screamed round Le Mans into the very late portion of the last decade.
Which brings us to Daytona. In America historic racing is different, with the focus on different kinds of cars and over abundances of one manufacturer (often Porsche) or another to be found at most events. Because American motorsport in some ways shields itself from the whims of the rest of the world, we find cars in America that not only never had a racing home outside the US, but definitely do not now.