A vibrant sea of VW campers swarms Goodwood Revival

This remarkable parade has got us all in the mood for what is bound to be a weekend of brilliant celebrations, as we embrace the notions of peace and love that were so prevalent during Goodwood’s original era. The rest of the day’s action on track is set to be a little more intense, but this is the perfect way to get the day underway.

What’s always great about the Revival Track Openings is the sheer variety of machinery on display, and there are few more diverse vehicles than the Volkswagen Type 2. Of the 120 vans making their way around the Motor Circuit, no two were the same.

Think campervan and there’s probably one manufacturer that springs to mind first. Volkswagen has made the genre its own for 75 years... except that’s not really the case at all. The Volkswagen Type 2 was originally designed as a utilitarian van. It was designed to work, and it was aftermarket converters such as Westfalia that saw its potential as a leisure vehicle.

It was the right car at the right time, and in the United States free-living and free-loving hippies took to the campervan in a way that Volkswagen could never have predicted when it started building vans in 1949 alongside the Type 1, better known as the Beetle.

There are several reasons the Volkswagen campervan caught one. For one thing, what its modest air-cooled four-cylinder lacked in performance it compensated for with economy. If you were going to go on a long haul across States, it would sip fuel parsimoniously. Sophisticated suspension for the time made it comfortable, too, while the slab-sided styling made the ideal canvas for psychedelic colour schemes.

The Volkswagen camper soon became more than a mere vehicle and transcended into a cultural statement. Its popularity spread across the Atlantic and it cemented its place in our psyche. Even modern-day Volkswagen Transporters, with their front-mounted water-cooled engines, benefit from the spirit of that original movement.

The earliest Volkswagen campers have a split windscreen, and it’s those that populate our track parades during this Revival weekend. Even that distinctive styling cue is reflective of the Type 1’s prosaic origins. It was introduced to aid the aerodynamics of the bluff-fronted van. It may be function over style, but that doesn’t diminish the style of our early morning convoys.

The 2025 Goodwood Revival is underway! You can watch every moment of the action by watching our live stream.

Photography by Joe Harding, Toby Whales, Rob Cooper and Charlie Brenninkmeijer.