Watch Volkswagen’s I.D. R SMASH the Goodwood FoS Hillclimb EV record

The Volkswagen I.D. R electric racer, built to take on the Pikes Peak Hillclimb, has now smashed the electric car record on the Goodwood Hillclimb.

Now Volkswagen is reinventing itself as a caring, climate aware, ‘clean’ car maker in the wake of the Dieslegate crisis, it’s planning a headlong dive in to a plethora of ‘ID’ electric cars to win buyers over to electric cars and lock in a cupboard its passion for diesel.

But even though the big shout for EVs is their (arguable) benefit to climate change, just like any car it’s good to have a performance ‘halo’ car to cast a glow on the more prosaic cars a maker offers.

No doubt VW will deliver performance EVs in the future, but they created the I.D. R – an electric car with more than a nod to Le Mans – as an ideal way to demonstrate EVs can be very impressive and very quick, and took it to Pikes Peak last month where it managed to blitz the all-time record.

Still basking in the achievements of the I.D. R at Pikes Peak, VW has taken it to the Goodwood Festival of Speed this weekend to try and do the same.

With a much shorter run at Goodwood than Pikes Peak, VW didn’t have any concerns about ‘managing’ the I.D. R as it blatted up the hill, and it showed with a record breaking run of 43.05 seconds, eclipsing the previous EV record, set by Jonny Cocker in a Lola-Drayson B12 69 in 2013 at 47.34s.

But however impressive the ID R was up the hillclimb, it didn’t manage to break the all-time record at Goodwood, a record set by Nick Heidfeld in 1999 in the McLaren MP4/13 in a time of 41.6s.

Interestingly, Jonny Crocker’s EV record was also broken by the road legal Nio EP9 with a time of 44.61 seconds.

You can watch Romain Dumas take the EV record for the Goodwood hillclimb in the video below.

Volkswagen I.D. R Goodwood Hillclimb record Video