Another year, another Goodwood Festival of Speed wraps up in a beautiful, contradictory cloud of tire smoke and billionaire nostalgia. The hillclimb entry list featured exactly what you would expect: priceless classic machinery, limited-run hypercars engineered primarily for Instagram algorithms, and a deep field of legitimate race cars. Yet, when the dust finally settled on the historic driveway, the quickest car of the entire weekend was a Ford Mustang Mach-E.
This is no ordinary, suburban grocery-getter. It is the Ford Super Mustang Mach-E, a purpose-built aerodynamic spaceship originally forged to assault the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Just three weeks prior, racing virtuoso Romain Dumas piloted this wild electric missile to victory at the legendary Race to the Clouds, recording a staggering time of 8:18.202.
During Sunday’s final Shoot-Out Final, Dumas proved once again that he has made an illustrious career out of winning. Rocketing up the short hillclimb, the Frenchman clocked a blistering 41.98 seconds. The triumph marks a spectacular hat-trick of three consecutive Goodwood victories for Dumas, and his fifth career title overall.
To put Dumas’ electric masterclass into perspective, he comfortably out-sprinted an actual open-wheel Gen4 Formula E car driven by Daniel Ticktum, which crossed the line in second place at 42.46 seconds. As it turns out, the fastest way to the top of the hill is an EV wrapped in a marketing-friendly crossover body shell.
The internal combustion relics never stood a chance, though they certainly put on a better acoustic soundtrack. Alex Summers dragged a glorious, screaming 1974 Shadow-Chevrolet DN4 Can-Am sports prototype into third place at 46.31 seconds, edging out Johan Kristoffersson’s VW Polo RallyCross car by a razor-thin 0.01 seconds. Meanwhile, crowd icon Travis Pastrana weaponized his custom Subaru Brataroo 9500 Turbo to clock a 46.77-second run, proving that smoke and pure showmanship still win the hearts of the fans.
Not to be outdone by the marketing circus, BMW showed up to celebrate 40 years of its iconic M3 moniker. To mark the milestone, the Munich executives rolled out the all-new M Concept Neue Klasse, a highly digital preview of the upcoming all-electric M3. Sensing that purists might riot over a silent M car, BMW cleverly brought along a pair of spectacular ancestors to soften the psychological blow: a pristine 1986 E30 M3 homologation special and the raw, limited-production 2011 E92 M3 GTS. It was a beautiful display of automotive history, serving as a nostalgic reminder of our combustion past while the stopwatch quietly pushes us into an inevitable electric future.
