RALPH'S COFFEE ARRIVES AT GOODWOOD REVIVAL'S POLO BAR

Four wheels, a faux leather bench seat and an imitation engine block carried Joshua Pearce across the Goodwood Revival finish line first this September, with a fully costumed Polo Bear clapping from the pit wall behind him. Pearce drove an Austin J40, the pedal car Austin Motor Company built for British children in the late 1940s with real spark plugs, battery powered headlights and no motor beneath that fake block. Ralph Lauren has presented the race built around that car, the Settrington Cup, every year since 2012, and in 2026 the brand stopped treating the race as a standalone sponsorship at this year's Revival. It built a small hospitality stretch around the grid instead, a Ralph's Coffee stand, its now familiar Polo Bar, and a table of DoubleRL pieces guests could handle between heats.

Joshua Pearce Crosses First in an Austin J40

Pearce took the overall win in a two part race that has run at the Revival since 2012, now in its fourteenth year, open to drivers between four and ten years old. The format has not changed since the first Settrington Cup, a Le Mans style sprint to the cars, then just under 250 yards down the start finish straight in an Austin J40, a toy the company built loosely off the shape of its road going A40 and sold with an imitation engine, faux leather upholstery and headlights that switched on. Ralph Lauren's name has sat on that race for most of its history. What changed this year sat around it, not on the entry list.

Ralph's Coffee Joins the Polo Bar in the Paddock

Ralph's Coffee, the shop format Ralph Lauren built out of its Madison Avenue flagship and has since opened in New York, Chicago and London, set up trackside at the Revival for the first time. It sat beside the Polo Bar, the hospitality format Ralph Lauren debuted at Wimbledon's Centre Court in July for the Gentlemen's Final, where it dressed guests including Liam Hemsworth. Ten weeks and one motorsport festival later, the same bar concept moved from grass court to grid, this time with DoubleRL pieces laid out for guests to handle between races. DoubleRL is Ralph Lauren's own workwear label, built on shuttle loom selvedge sourcing since he founded it in 1993, and setting its pieces beside a coffee counter rather than a runway is a specific kind of flex. The label does not need a show to be worth handling in person.

The Bear That Worked Centre Court Now Works the Grid

The Polo Bear clapping for Pearce at the Settrington Cup is not a new character this year. Ralph Lauren put the mascot through a CGI and live action campaign with Tom Hiddleston in July, built around the brand's 20th year as Wimbledon's official outfitter. A digital bear on a screen and a costumed one clapping for an eight year old in a pedal car are different jobs, and Goodwood is the one where the bear has to show up in a suit, in real weather, next to a coffee cart with a line. That is the pattern across this year's calendar. Ralph Lauren keeps taking formats built for one property, tennis whites and Centre Court hospitality, and running them again somewhere with none of Wimbledon's polish, a children's pedal car race at a vintage motor festival, to see if the format holds without the occasion doing the work for it.

It mostly holds. A coffee counter and a merchandise table are not hard sells at a family event, and DoubleRL pieces set out rather than modeled cost Ralph Lauren little beyond the folding tables and the staff. The harder proof is Pearce's lap, run in a design pushing eighty years old, past a brand that has now run three separate hospitality formats inside four months: Wimbledon's Polo Bar, Goodwood's new coffee stand, and a Polo Bear working both in person rather than on a screen.