electric racing

Porsche is preparing to release its Cayenne EV in the next year or so, but that didn’t stop it from taking the car out in secret to a hillclimb meet, where it utterly destroyed the SUV course record previously held by a 12-cylinder Bentley Bentayga.

The Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb had its 102nd running today, and several EVs which set out to post new records have done so today, with the Rivian R1T and Ioniq 5N both claiming records, and the Ford SuperTruck being the fastest vehicle up the hill on the day.

Rivian’s new high-powered Ascend Quad Max R1T variant will race up Pike’s Peak, one of the longest-running and most difficult races in the world, this weekend.

Dubai has just announced the creation of a new electric scooter racing event that will feature the fastest electric racing scooters in the world. The Dubai Electric Scooter Cup is intended to become the preeminent international electric scooter race.

A fully electric car has beaten every car ever at the Goodwood Hillclimb track at the Festival of Speed, an annual gathering and demonstration of racing vehicles in England. The McMurtry Speirling fan car driven by Indycar and ex-F1 driver Max Chilton set a record of 39.08 seconds on the 1.86km (1.16 mile) course, almost a second better than the previous record.

Fourteen-time champion Stephane Peterhansel suffered massive suspension damage to his electric Audi RS Q e-tron yesterday while running second in the Dakar Rally. After waiting nearly four hours for a support truck to arrive, news reached the Audi team that a second RS Q-tron – this one driven by World Rally Champion Carlos Sainz (’90, ’92) – had gotten lost, adding nearly two hours to their stage time and effectively eliminating the Audis from contention.

How did it all go so wrong for Audi?

We’ve followed the development of the eSkootr Championship (eSC) since its inception in mid-2020. There’s just something about racers on 60 mph (100 km/h) electric scooters speeding around a track while standing up that boggles the mind.

Early reports of the nascent racing league saw its developers working to turn the eSC into a respectable organized racing event, and recent signs show that effort has been largely successful as the league prepares to draft the first racers. The group is also working on shirking many of the common barriers to racing today, such as economic hurdles and gender inequality.

A Plaid Tesla Model S has set a new electric lap record at the famous Nürburgring Nordschleife racetrack in Germany, with a lap time of 7:35.579. This beats the Porsche Taycan’s time by 7 seconds, and is quite competitive with the gas-powered competition as well.

Update: Tesla and Nürburgring have released a statement that 7:35.579 is the official record, despite that being the slower of the two laps on the time slip.

The Formula E electric-vehicle racing series was conceived in 2011. Nearly a decade later, EVs are well on the way to mass commercialization. Airspeeder, the first motorsports program for electric flying cars, this week announced raising a seven-figure sum to launch its series. Founders of the flying EV series believe it could accelerate progress toward mainstream sustainable, electric air mobility.

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What would happen if you took the power of a Tesla motor and stuffed it into a glorified go-kart? You’d get a crazy powerful electric race car just like this one!

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The world-famous – and famously deadly – Isle of Man TT race is going on this week, and alongside the gas superbike races there’s an electric-only TT Zero class racing in its tenth year.

In this year’s race, Michael Rutter and Team Mugen set a new electric superbike lap record for the course, with a 121.91mph (196.2km/h) lap in 18:34.172.  This narrowly beats the previous record by about a second, and about a tenth of a mile per hour.  This is Rutter’s fifth win of the TT Zero.

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For the first time ever, the 24 Hours of Lemons race will include an electric car category. The event, which features cheap, inexpensive cars battling it out over 24 hours, is set to award the first ever electric-class winner with 1 Million nickels (or $50,000, for those that don’t want to do the math).

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Today Jaguar officially announced that it will join the third season of the Formula E championship. The company also unveiled the design of its all-electric race car. The company says it will use the Formula E platform as a “test bed” for its electric powertrain technology.
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Formula E, which starts its second season on Saturday, announced that Leonardo DiCaprio will promote electric vehicles for the organisation and become Chairman of the championship’s newly created ‘Sustainability Committee’.

The committee will focus on promoting the mass adoption of electric vehicles and the “long term imprint” of the Formula E in the cities where it races.
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