A fully electric car has broken all previous records during the Festival of Speed at the Goodwood Hillclimb track. The McMurtry Speirling fan car, driven by Indycar and former F1 driver Max Chilton, set a record of 39.08 seconds over the 1.86 km (1.16 mi) course, nearly a second off the previous record.
Electrek’s accordingThe previous record was set in 2019 by Romain Dumas in a Volkswagen ID.R electric racecar and he achieved a record time of 39.9 seconds. Dumas broke the record for 20 years, where he took less time to complete the course than the record set by F1 driver Nick Heidfeld in a V10 McLaren F1 in the 1998 season.
Goodwood Road and Racing has posted a video of this record on its YouTube channel, in which the car is running at a tremendous speed. The surprise here is the speed as well as the smooth cornering by the car. The video is embedded below:
The car reaches top speed in a matter of seconds. Electrek’s accordingIn the initial 1.5 seconds, the electric car catches a speed of 60mph (about 97 kmph). The entire course consists of climbs with many twists and turns, but going by the video, it appears that the car was able to cross all these obstacles with ease.
This is a fan car, which is an electric car, but has a fan underneath that draws air up and pushes it out the back of the car, creating a vacuum under the car. This creates downforce, and reduces drag. As a result, fan cars can go faster with less drag, and can easily corner into sharp turns, even at high speeds, than other vehicles that rely on conventional aerodynamic surfaces.