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Love the Goodwood Revival but hate the Monday-morning blues afterwards? Help is at hand. Thankfully, you don’t have to wait another year for the Revival’s unique fix of beautiful cars and beautiful people set amid such, well, beautiful scenery: on the first Sunday of certain months, a gathering of like-minded souls called the Goodwood Breakfast Club takes place.

A car-spotter’s paradise and mental jousting ground for anoraks — think Top Trumps for real — the club has car enthusiasts across the nation clearing a space in their diary, bringing their pride and joy out for a very public airing and enjoying that most English of institutions, the full fry-up.

Naturally, like the cars on display, the Tourist Trophy breakfast is the very best that the Goodwood estate has to offer. Organic scrambled eggs, Goodwood organic sausages, bacon, mushrooms and tomato are accompanied by unlimited tea, coffee or fruit juice. Should the petite dimensions of your chosen sports car preclude such indulgences, then may we suggest tea and pastries at the Richmond Lawn Bar?

Joining the throng at the recent August Breakfast Club, we chew the fat about cars with their owners and bystanding visitors while we chew on our delicious food. Questions are welcomed. Facts and figures are shared — the more obscure, the better, of course. Notes between fellow owners are compared. This is an easy-going event, where egos are put aside and cars of all values, historical significance and interest line up side by side in the timeless but laid-back surroundings of the Goodwood Racing Circuit. Best of all, entry is free.

At the August event the theme is “The quintessential pre-1980 sports car and motorbike”, but there will be seven events in total this year, from March to November, including such tempting descriptions as “Modern supercar legends”, “Soft-top Sunday” and “Sushi Sunday” — the last of those, on November 2, a celebration of Japanese sporting machinery.

Sure enough, the “quintessential” element of the title has brought classic British sports cars out in their droves this Sunday in August, despite the miserable British summertime weather doing its best to damp spirits. Lines of MGBs, MGCs, TR4s, Healeys and Sprites represented the golden age of the “affordable” British sportster, turning the old paddock garages into a patriotic exhibition of British racing green and cellulose-based primary hues.

Not every car there had been painstakingly prepared to concours condition. The wonderfully eccentric sight of Theo Gillam arriving in his 1951 Bristol 401 2 litre soon grabs our attention, along with that of the rest of the Breakfasters nearby. Gillam instantly becomes a micro-celebrity, and it’s easy to understand why once you’ve seen his car. Having lain dormant in a barn for 30-odd years, the Bristol now runs a diesel engine and has been extensively restored, albeit only the oily bits underneath where the eye can’t see — until he offers to show you under the bonnet. The rusty, brown-orange exterior still looks as if it has just been driven out from under the haystack, with flaking paint bristling on the bonnet. Gillam, from down the road in Bognor Regis, is known to many as a motoring journalist in the pages of Practical Classics magazine, and actually restored the Bristol as part of a £100 bet with his wife — which he won.

Clive Sayer’s 1963 Triumph TR4 is a lesson for those of a weak disposition who will easily fall under the Breakfast Club’s spell. The local man actually bought the car at a Breakfast Club event last year, when he was looking for “simply something to have fun in and enjoy” at weekends. “The location here is good, and even the drive down is great,” he says, and I have to concur, looking at his lovely old Triumph basking in the attention.

Then there’s Mark Gibson from London and his wonderfully period-looking beige 1968 Jaguar E-type 2+2, a 40th birthday present from his wife — which raises the question, what on earth did he treat her to in reciprocation? To so many here, the E-type is something of a pin-up, and Mark says it’s a car he’s wanted for a long time. “I needed the extra seats as I have two sprogs,” he adds, before chipping in wryly with: “Never buy on colour; buy on the lack of rust.”

Of course, there are plenty of supercars here today, such as a delectable Lamborghini Miura that whined and growled its way onto the pit straight to join a Ferrari 250 GT Lusso and Daytona. There are the Porsches, the Aston Martins and the Maseratis, but there is also a lovely but rather forlorn BMW 2800 CS with a note in the window that reads simply: “Does anyone wish to take on this old girl?” And the almost freakishly pristine BMC 1100 belonging to Donald Noble, complete with its original sales invoice and 1960s paraphernalia of travel rug, ladies’ handbag, sunglasses and period picnic set carefully arranged on the back seat.

So, as you can see, it’s a broad church, the Goodwood Breakfast Club. Clear a space in the diary for the last meeting of the year, on November 2, or keep an eye out for next year’s dates. If you love cars, there are few finer ways to spend a Sunday morning than by joining this congregation.

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• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

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