Electric Volkswagen smashes F1 record at Goodwood
Volkswagen ID.R concept racer breaks decades-old outright hillclimb recordThe Volkswagen ID.R electric sports car concept broke the 20-year-old outright record of a Formula 1 car for the hillclimb at Britain’s Goodwood Festival of Speed at the weekend.
Frenchman Romain Dumas raced the 500kW EV racer up the 1.86km track in the south of England in 39.9 seconds – 1.7 seconds faster than German F1 driver Nick Heidfeld did it in a 574kW McLaren-Mercedes MP4/13 in 1999.
The VW had been specially lightened to less than 1000kg for Goodwood after setting records at the Pikes Peak hillclimb in the US and Germany’s Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit.
“The short hillclimb is a very special challenge,” said Dumas, who previously set the EV record for the Goodwood Hillclimb in 2018.
“Because the track is so short, I could not afford to make even the slightest mistake and every aspect of the fine-tuning of the ID.R had to be perfect.
“That was particularly challenging as we were not able to test on the route beforehand.”
There was an estimated attendance of 180,000 for this year’s Goodwood festival, where Volkswagen also showed the ID.3 hatch — the first in a series of all-electric VW ID models to be released from next year in Europe, and from 2022 in Australia.
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