The Goodwood Festival of Speed happened this weekend, and Ford’s electric SuperVan managed to beat every other vehicle, gas or electric, to the top of the hill.
The Goodwood Festival of Speed is a yearly event on the grounds of Goodwood House, a historic estate in West Sussex, England. The event started in 1993, and has become one of the largest motorsports festivals in the world.
Many companies attend Goodwood to debut new models, and enthusiasts or race teams will show off rare or customized vehicles or race unique cars.
One of the central features of the event is the Goodwood hillclimb, a short one-way race up a small hill on the property. The track is only 1.17mi/1.89km long, with a 304ft/92.7m uphill climb. It’s not a particularly taxing event – merely a fun way to show off some classic or unique racing vehicles.
This year, several EVs debuted at Goodwood, including these previously covered on Electrek:
Many of these vehicles participate in the hillclimb, though some do it only in a demonstration capacity – they’re not trying for the best time, just showing off in front of the crowd.
But other vehicles join the “shootout,” the race event for bragging rights, trying to get the top time to the top of the hill.
For 20 years, the record was held by a 1998 V10 F1 car piloted by Nick Heidfeld. That record was broken in 2019 by Romain Dumas driving VW’s ID.R electric racecar, and then in 2022, the current 39.08 second record was set by Max Chilton in the McMurtry Spierling “fan car,” an electric car which uses a giant fan under the car to create negative pressure for additional downforce to help acceleration and cornering.
This year, nobody was really going for the record, but the big contest was between two vehicles: Subaru’s “Project Midnight,” a heavily modified WRX with a 670hp flat-four ICE engine piloted by Scott Speed; and Ford’s SuperVan, an E-Transit-in-name-only that has been rebuilt as a 1,400hp racecar and was piloted by former recordholder Romain Dumas.
In qualifying, the two vehicles were neck and neck, with the SuperVan pipping the Subaru by a tenth of a second – 45.0 to 45.1. But it would be down to the wire on the Sunday Shootout.
And when the results came in on Sunday, the SuperVan smashed the WRX – with a time of 43.98 seconds, compared to the ICE Subaru’s 46.07.
Here’s the video, queued up for the SuperVan (if you want to watch previous runs, scroll back – the SuperVan is the last one – and the official timing shows a little different than what’s shown on the broadcast):
This isn’t the first impressive showing from the SuperVan. Ford shattered track records at Bathurst in it, and took it to Pike’s Peak last year as well and had an impressive showing. This year, Ford sent a different vehicle to Pike’s Peak, the SuperTruck, which set the fastest time of the day but failed to set a record (and indeed was slower than the SuperVan’s previous effort – as the SuperTruck had an unexpected shutdown partway up the hill this year).
And all of this is particularly interesting because race cars aren’t supposed to be giant vans. Maintaining low weight is an important aspect for a racecar, as the more you weigh, the harder it is to accelerate, brake and turn. So this honking beast’s performance is quite impressive – though we think we’d rather have something a little smaller for normal racing purposes.
One more piece of EV news from this year’s Goodwood – Lotus brought its one-off, multi-million-dollar Evija X, which it used to set an insane 6:24.047 laptime at Nurburgring earlier this year, and managed to crash it immediately after the starting line as its 1,704Nm of torque became unmanageable from a standing start. So we’ll have to wait to see what time it might set… possibly with traction control activated next time.