When Ford sends an electric vehicle up a mountain, it is purely about absolute mechanical dominance. The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has spent 103 editions since 1916 chewing up race cars and spitting them into the woods.
Starting at an oxygen-deprived 2,862 meters and climbing to a dizzying 4,300 meters with a brutal 7.2% average grade, this legendary “Race to the Clouds” is a logistical nightmare for traditional internal combustion engines. Up there, gas-guzzlers choke on thin air, requiring ridiculous engine displacements just to breathe. Electric vehicles, however, do not need oxygen to explode out of corners.
Ford understood this EV advantage early on, though they initially insisted on attacking the mountain with what looked like weaponized delivery vehicles. After winning with their absurd SuperVan and a glitch-prone SuperTruck, Dearborn finally stopped playing around and built a legitimate weapon: the 1,400-horsepower Super Mustang Mach-E.
This silhouette racer shares nothing with the suburban electric SUV sitting in your neighbor’s driveway; it is a full-blown GT beast. To pilot it, they hired Romain Dumas, the absolute Pikes Peak record holder who famously clocked a 7:57.148 back in 2018 with the Volkswagen ID.R.
The 2025 attempt was a frustrating heartbreak. Extreme winds forced organizers to chop the course in half, neutralizing the EV’s high-altitude advantage and allowing Simone Faggioli’s lightweight, gas-powered Nova Proto NP01 to snatch the overall win by five seconds. Dumas pragmatically noted that “the mountain decides”, but Ford clearly refused to take no for an answer, returning for absolute redemption in 2026.
This time, the mountain complied. Despite qualifying seven seconds behind Faggioli’s prototype on the lower section, the narrative completely flipped once the full, uncompromised 12.42-mile asphalt ribbon opened up. Dumas unleashed all 1,400 horses, storming to the summit in a blistering 8:18.202 to officially claim the “King of the Mountain” title.
Ford completely dismantled the field, beating runner-up Robin Shute by over eleven seconds, while 2025 champion Faggioli was relegated to a distant third. The Mustang’s time was nearly thirty seconds faster than Ford’s old SuperVan record, proving that aerodynamics actually matter more than racing a giant aerodynamic brick. While it fell 21 seconds short of the immortal VW ID.R unlimited record, Ford’s production-based monster established absolute electric supremacy, especially after its sole EV rival, Evasive Motorsports’ Ioniq 5N.
