Formula E's new GEN4 car announced itself at the Goodwood Festival of Speed with a run quick enough to embarrass most of the field, and still finished second to a Ford.
The car made its public debut on the famous 1.16-mile hillclimb over the July 9-12 weekend, driven by Cupra Kiro's Dan Ticktum. On paper it is the most extreme machine Formula E has built: 600kW (around 815bhp), a 210mph top speed, 0-100km/h in 1.8 seconds and, for the first time in the series, permanent all-wheel drive.
"This isn't just an incremental step forward, the Gen4 represents a massive performance leap in Formula E history," said championship CEO Jeff Dodds, who called Goodwood "the perfect stage to give the public its first up close look at the Gen4 car in action."
Ticktum needed little persuading. He had promised the car "handles like an absolute weapon with that permanent all-wheel drive" and would be "wild" up the hill, and it delivered. "I was pretty surprised at how fast the GEN4 was, but shrink everything down to a track like this, and add a load of bumps and it was quite mind-blowing the first time I went up there," he said.
His best effort in the Sunday shoot-out was 42.46 seconds, a time that buried everything with an internal-combustion engine. But it was not the quickest car on the hill. That honour went to Romain Dumas in Ford's purpose-built Super Mustang Mach-E, which stopped the clocks at 41.98 seconds, 0.48s clear of the Formula E car. Every other competitor finished more than four seconds back, and for the first time both of the shoot-out's top two runners were electric.
The Ford is a monster built for a very different job. Conceived for Pikes Peak, it produces 1,600bhp from three motors driving all four wheels and generates roughly 6,900lb of downforce. Dumas had won the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb only three weeks earlier in the same car, and at Goodwood he claimed Ford's third straight shoot-out title and his own fifth overall.
Ticktum was left to wonder what might have been. Dust at Turn 2 and over the crest cost him on his final attempt. "I had a big moment, which is a shame because on a clean track I think we could have done the 41.6s time," he said, a run that would have beaten the Ford outright.
He was philosophical about it. "For a car that is obviously built for circuits, and not a hillclimb, and me in my first time here, I am happy with how quickly I got up to speed," he said.
The GEN4's competition career begins in earnest on December 18-19 in Jeddah, when the numbers that turned heads at Goodwood will finally be pointed at other race cars rather than a Sussex hillside.
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