The Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb is one of the most watched motorsport spectacles in the world. Every July, the 1.16-mile course from the house to the top of the hill hosts the world’s finest racing cars and motorcycles in a display of speed, sound, and spectacle that draws 200,000 visitors over four days. To hold a record at Goodwood is to have your achievement measured against the full history of motorsport.
When Drayson Racing Technologies brought the B12/69EV to Goodwood and set the fastest electric vehicle time up the hill, it was a statement delivered to the largest possible audience: that electric performance had arrived at the highest level.
Why Goodwood Mattered
The Festival of Speed is not a conventional motorsport venue. It is, uniquely, a place where the emotional and historical dimensions of motorsport are as important as the competitive ones. Cars that have won Le Mans, Formula 1 world championships, and land speed records climb the same hill alongside modern F1 cars and road-legal hypercars. The audience is knowledgeable, passionate, and global in reach through broadcast and digital distribution.
For DRT, Goodwood offered something that a private test venue or specialist speed event could not: a mainstream audience for the electric performance message. Achieving a record at Goodwood meant that the story would be told not just in specialist motorsport media but across the full spectrum of automotive and general interest channels.
The Course: What the Goodwood Hill Demands
The 1.16-mile Goodwood hill climb course is deceptively complex. From the start at the house, the road climbs through a series of corners that demand high mechanical grip, aggressive acceleration out of slow corners, and precise aerodynamic management through the faster sections. The surface is historic estate road — not a purpose-built racing circuit — with the character and variability that implies.
For an electric vehicle, the course presents both advantages and challenges compared to internal combustion competition. The absence of the need to manage gear changes allows smoother, more precise corner exit acceleration. The instant torque of the electric motor eliminates the throttle lag that can unsettle a rear-wheel-drive car on the power. Against this, the battery state of charge must be managed across the course — a full-power run up the hill is an extreme discharge event for the battery system.
The battery management challenge at Goodwood drew directly on the thermal and discharge engineering developed during the land speed record programme. The full technical story of that battery system is told in our post on lightweight composite battery packs balancing power density and safety.
Preparation: Making the B12/69EV Goodwood-Ready
Adapting the B12/69EV from its land speed record configuration for the Goodwood hill climb required significant setup changes. The aerodynamic configuration was shifted from minimum-drag (appropriate for a straight-line speed attempt) toward a higher-downforce setting suitable for a technical circuit. Front and rear wing angles were increased, and the suspension geometry was adjusted for the tighter cornering demands of the hill.
Tyre selection was critical. The land speed record car used tyres optimised for straight-line stability at extreme speeds. Goodwood required tyres that could generate maximum lateral grip in the slow-speed corners that characterise the hill’s lower section, while maintaining stability through the faster upper sections.
Lord Drayson Behind the Wheel
Lord Drayson drove the Goodwood record run as he drove the land speed record attempt — personally, with the racing licence and experience to extract the car’s performance. His background in GT racing (including international competition at Le Mans) gave him the car control and circuit reading ability to manage the B12/69EV’s extreme performance within the safety constraints of a public hillclimb event.
His post-run description of the car’s behaviour on the hill — the controlled aggression of the motor’s torque delivery, the aerodynamic load building through the upper sections, the precision required to manage the car’s energy across the full course — captured both the technical demands and the visceral excitement of the run in a way that communicated directly to the Festival’s audience.
The Goodwood run was one of several public demonstrations of electric performance that DRT delivered across its programmes. The full context of these demonstrations — and their role in building the case for electric motorsport — is explored in our post on why DRT was the first team to sign for Formula E.
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