Goodwood does vintage racers, Le Mans legends and Formula 1 noise better than anywhere else on the calendar. But if you want to know where the real madness happens, follow the crowds to the Supercar Paddock. Year after year it gathers the absolute pinnacle of modern performance, and 2026 was no exception. Two thousand horsepower with a gated manual. A flat-eight engine nobody has built for a road car in fifty years. Adrian Newey driving his own hypercar up the hill. Here are the ten that mattered.
Gordon Murray S1 LM and Le Mans GTR
Gordon Murray treats Goodwood like home turf, and this year he brought four cars, two of them from the new Special Vehicles division.
The S1 LM was the headline, making its European debut as a design model on the GMA stand. Five will be built, honouring the five McLaren F1 GTRs that finished the 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours, and all five went to a single client before the public had seen the car. One of those slots later crossed the block at RM Sotheby’s in Las Vegas for $20.63 million, the most ever paid for a new car at auction. Underneath, it is a reworked T.50: carbon monocoque, central driving position, high-revving Cosworth V12, six-speed manual. Murray designed it while undergoing cancer treatment and has said the project helped carry him through it, which gives the car a weight no spec sheet can.
The Le Mans GTR is a love letter to endurance racing’s golden age, and the XP1 prototype was the one on the move. It shares the T.50 and T.50s foundations, including the 4.0-litre Cosworth V12 that revs to 12,100rpm for 654bhp and the six-speed manual, but the rear fan is gone, replaced by passive boundary layer control, and almost everything else is new. The bodywork stretches into a proper longtail, drawing on the Porsche 917LH, the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33/3 and the Matra-Simca MS660. Production is capped at 24 cars, one for every hour of the race that made Murray’s name, and all of them are sold.
Rounding out the stand were the first customer T.50s Niki Lauda, in a livery honouring Murray’s first Formula 1 win at Kyalami in 1974, and the T.33 Spider validation prototype in green. Both ran the Hill. Four cars, four different arguments for the same idea.
Hennessey Venom F5-M
Goodwood’s celebration of Americana would not be complete without Hennessey, and the F5-M was arguably the loudest statement of the weekend. Under the engine cover sits the 6.6-litre twin-turbo Fury V8, here in Venom F5 Evolution tune for 2,031bhp. The party trick is the gearbox: a genuine six-speed gated manual from CIMA, with a billet aluminium lever sitting in a milled gate, which required Hennessey to redesign the carbon monocoque around a third pedal and rebuild the traction control from scratch.
Hennessey announced the F5-M in 2024 with 1,817bhp. The car that turned up at Goodwood has an extra 214, making it the most powerful manual production car ever built.
Only twelve will be made, all roadsters, at roughly $2.65 million each, and every slot is taken. Chassis one belongs to a UK collector and wears exposed purple carbon with anodised gold accents and a hand-painted Union Jack on the 1,400mm dorsal fin. Alex Brundle ran it up the Hill twice a day across the four days, with a Venom F5 Revolution Evo alongside it on the stand. An open-top, two-thousand-horsepower stick shift. Only the Americans.
Pagani Huayra Codalunga Speedster
A few years back Pagani reimagined the longtail with the Huayra Codalunga, a run of five cars from the Grandi Complicazioni special projects division. Horacio Pagani decided the story needed an open roof to properly capture 1960s sports-prototype racing, and the Speedster is the result.
This is not a coupe with the roof cut off. Pagani built a new carbo-titanium monocoque specifically for the open car, fitted conventional doors in place of the coupe’s gullwings, and added a third pair of titanium exhaust outlets low in the diffuser for a distinct sound signature. The 6.0-litre AMG twin-turbo V12 is uprated to 852bhp and 811lb ft, and for the first time on a Codalunga buyers can specify a genuine seven-speed Xtrac manual rather than paddles. Ten will be built, with proportions borrowed from the Porsche 908 LH and Ferrari 330 P4.
Pagani has not published a price. What we do know is that the five coupes cost no less than £6 million each, and given the Speedster’s new tub and bespoke commissioning, evo expects it to be no cheaper. Call it £6 million and upwards, which buys a level of artistry that will almost certainly command legendary status on the collector market.
Koenigsegg Gemera
Koenigsegg always brings theatre, and this year that meant three cars: a Sadair’s Spear, a full-size drivable LEGO Technic replica of it, and the production Gemera.
The LEGO car deserves its own paragraph. It took 327,906 pieces and more than 9,400 hours to build, and Koenigsegg test driver Markus Lundh ran it up the Goodwood hill at 69mph, more than doubling the previous record for a drivable LEGO vehicle, before it went on public display at the Festival.
The Gemera was the real headliner. We have seen the concept plenty of times, but seeing Koenigsegg’s idea of a family car in production trim is something else. It pairs the 5.0-litre hot-vee twin-turbo V8 with the Dark Matter raxial flux e-motor for 2,300hp through the nine-speed Light Speed Tourbillon transmission, with four genuine seats, four-wheel drive and a top speed beyond 400km/h. The original 2.0-litre three-cylinder was quietly dropped because almost nobody wanted it. Christian von Koenigsegg put it plainly to Top Gear: “In a nutshell, they all turned into V8s.” Three hundred will be built and all are sold. This is not just the fastest four-seater on earth, it is a rewrite of the hypercar rulebook.
RUF B8 prototype
For years, casual petrolheads only knew RUF as the workaround in racing games when developers could not get the Porsche licence. Enthusiasts know better, and this year’s debut is the proof.
RUF built an entirely new engine. Not a stretched flat-six, a clean-sheet 4.8-litre twin-turbocharged flat-eight, designed and developed in house and known internally as the B8 Erprober, which translates as boxer-eight tester. It makes more than 1,000bhp and 737lb ft, and it drives through a six-speed manual. Flat-eights are almost unheard of in road cars: Porsche raced them in the 1960s in the 804 Formula 1 car and the 908, but the last one fitted to a road car was the Porsche 914/8, more than fifty years ago.
For now it lives in a CTR3 prototype stretched by 100mm to make room, finished in a black and yellow livery that nods to the Blossom Yellow of the CTR Yellowbird, and Tanner Foust drove it up the Hill. RUF says the B8 will shape a future production model. On the evidence of the noise it made, that cannot come soon enough.
Apollo EVO
Apollo has re-entered the hypercar arena in spectacular fashion. The EVO first appeared as a running prototype in late 2021, and almost five years later the first customer car has arrived. Commissioned through Apollo’s Forge bespoke programme and named Caribbean Dragon, it made its public debut at Goodwood and ran the Hill.
At its core sits a 6.3-litre naturally aspirated V12 that began life as a Ferrari engine and was extensively reworked by HWA, producing 789bhp in a gold-lined engine bay. Apollo quotes 0 to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds and 207mph. The numbers that matter more are the other two: 1,300kg dry, and 1,350kg of downforce at full load. It generates more downforce than it weighs.
Performance still takes a back seat to presence. The bodywork is a storm of spine-like fins, razor-sharp wings and horns across more than 75 carbon panels, with eight coats of hand-applied paint taking over 1,000 hours. The centrepiece is the Dragon Skin exhaust, a single-piece 3D-printed titanium structure that takes 123 hours to print, is rated to 1,000°C, and will discolour to a deep blue with track use. Production is capped at ten cars at €3 million before taxes, roughly £2.6 million, and options push that well past. Launched as a track-only weapon, though history tells us these specials often find a path to a numberplate. A 2009 Gumpert Apollo and an Apollo IE were also on hand, a fitting link back to where this all started.
Lanzante Lamborghini Essenza SCV12
Lanzante are the undisputed kings of the automotive what-if. If a manufacturer builds something extreme and insists it can never wear a numberplate, Lanzante treats that as a personal challenge. The back catalogue includes the McLaren P1 GTR, the Senna GTR, the Porsche 935 and the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento.
This year the firm turned up with an armful. Its stand held the world’s first road-legal Bugatti Bolide, and the McLaren P1 HDK and Lanzante 95-59 both ran. The one that stopped us, though, was a road-registered Lamborghini Essenza SCV12, driven up the Hill by Wade Eastwood and Sergio Perez.
The SCV12 was built by Squadra Corse as 40 track-only cars around a naturally aspirated 830bhp V12, with no intention of it ever seeing a public road. Lanzante has changed that, and the point is not novelty. As Dean Lanzante puts it, “We are trying to build cars that are genuinely usable.” Full technical details of the conversion are still to come, but a naturally aspirated Lamborghini V12 on a public road, in 2026, is worth celebrating on its own.
Mercedes-AMG PureSpeed
Remember when every high-end marque caught open-top fever? Ferrari gave us the Monza SP1 and SP2, McLaren the Elva, Aston Martin the V12 Speedster, Bentley the Bacalar. Mercedes-AMG arrived fashionably late, and then made the biggest scene of the lot.
The PureSpeed is the first car in the new Mythos series, limited to 250 examples. There is no roof, no side glass and no windscreen. In their place is a steel halo bar rising between the seats and meeting the rear roll hoops, straight out of modern Formula 1, while the twin humps behind the seats nod to the 300 SLR and the front end borrows from the AMG One. The red-and-black finish and the number 10 on the flanks reference the Mercedes that won the 1924 Targa Florio, painted red so Italian fans would not slow it down. Buyers get two aerodynamic helmets with a built-in intercom, which tells you everything about the ownership experience.
Underneath it is an SL 63: the 577bhp 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, all-wheel drive, nine-speed gearbox, 0 to 62mph in 3.6 seconds and 196mph. Mercedes never published a list price, but European figures of around €920,000 to €1 million have been reported, so reckon on comfortably north of £800,000. That is a lot of money for an SL with the glass removed, and it is not road legal in the United States. As sheer theatre, though, nothing else in the paddock came close.
Red Bull RB17
We watched Red Bull’s teasers for years. A static design model appeared at Goodwood in 2024, a refined version in 2025, and this year it finally moved. The RB17 carries plenty of Newey DNA and you can spot the Aston Martin Valkyrie in its shrink-wrapped aero and AMR Pro-style rear wing, but do not mistake it for a Valkyrie in a blue jacket.
Behind the cockpit is a bespoke 4.5-litre naturally aspirated Cosworth V10 revving to 15,000rpm for around 1,000bhp, paired with a 200bhp electric motor for a total near 1,200bhp. No turbos, no Formula 1 hybrid complexity, just a V10 at 15,000rpm on a Sussex hillside. It weighs under 900kg and Red Bull quotes more than 350km/h. Fifty will be built, all track-only, at a reported £5 million each.
The best part was the driving roster. Isack Hadjar, Yuki Tsunoda and Alisha Palmowski all took turns, and so did Adrian Newey, finally getting his hands on the car he conceived. It will stay track-only, too, at least until Lanzante get hold of one.
Zenvo Aurora Tur
When Zenvo showed the ST1 in 2009, plenty of people filed the Danish marque under boutique hopefuls destined to fade away. Several models and the best part of two decades later, including the TS1 and the wing-tilting TSR-S, that looks like a bad call.
The Aurora comes in two flavours: the track-focused, rear-drive Agil and the grand touring Tur. The Tur is the one that took the spotlight. Behind the cockpit sits an entirely new 6.6-litre quad-turbocharged V12 called Mjølner, developed with Mahle Powertrain, making 1,250bhp on its own and revving to 9,800rpm. Zenvo says that makes it the most powerful V12 ever fitted to a road car. Add three electric motors worth another 600bhp and the Tur has 1,850bhp and four-wheel drive, at 1,548kg dry. Zenvo quotes 2.3 seconds to 62mph, nine seconds to 186mph and a 260mph top speed.
Production runs to 50 Tur and 50 Agil, 100 in total, from €2.8 million plus local taxes, or roughly £2.4 million. What ran at Goodwood were two production-spec validation prototypes rather than finished cars, with customer deliveries due from 2027. On this evidence, Zenvo’s future looks bright.
If one of these has caught your eye, or you are after something with the same character that is already on the road, the team at Redline Specialist Cars is always happy to talk. Have a look through our current specialist and performance stock, or get in touch and tell us what you are after.
