Goodwood 2026 Recap: An All-Electric Shootout Podium, and Adrian Newey Drove the Car He Designed for the Team He Left
The 33rd Festival of Speed ran under a 'Rivals' theme, and the closing Sunday Shootout delivered one of its own — a battery-powered Mustang beating a Formula E prototype to the line, with the fastest combustion car more than three and a half seconds back.
The 33rd Goodwood Festival of Speed ran Thursday through Sunday, July 9–12, at the Duke of Richmond's West Sussex estate, built this year around a theme of 'Rivals' — the duels, on track and between manufacturers, that have defined motorsport history. Fittingly, the event's own closing act turned into one of its best rivalries in years.
The Sunday Timed Shootout — Goodwood's traditional finale, where the fastest cars from the weekend take one last run at the hill — came down to Romain Dumas in a Ford Super Mustang Mach-E against Dan Ticktum in a prototype Gen4 Formula E car. Dumas got there first, dipping under the 42-second mark with a 41.98-second run for his fifth career Shootout win and Ford's third consecutive Shootout victory — each one, notably, in a different car. Ticktum's Formula E prototype took second, meaning the top two Shootout positions both went to electric machinery for the first time in the event's history. Third place, and the fastest internal-combustion car of the day, went to Alex Summers in a Shadow-Chevrolet DN4 Can-Am car, more than three and a half seconds off Dumas's pace.
None of that touched the outright hillclimb record, which has stood since 2022: Max Chilton's 39.081-second run in the electric McMurtry Spéirling fan car. McMurtry returned in 2025 hoping to reclaim its own record and came up short at 40.056 seconds — the mark has now stood for four consecutive festivals.
The weekend's other headline belonged to a car that wasn't racing anyone. Red Bull brought its RB17 hypercar — a track-only, Adrian Newey-designed machine built around a naturally aspirated Cosworth V10 hybrid powertrain, weighing under 900kg and targeting more than 1,200bhp and a top speed beyond 350km/h — for its first public dynamic running. Only 50 will be built, at a reported £5 million each. Newey himself, who left Red Bull in 2024 after 19 years running its technical department and now serves as team principal and managing technical partner at Aston Martin, drove it up the hill alongside current Red Bull drivers Isack Hadjar and Yuki Tsunoda and Red Bull Racing Academy driver Alisha Palmowski — the man who designed the car making a brief return to pilot it for the team he no longer works for.
Damon Hill supplied the weekend's history lesson, running two genuine pieces of Williams F1 heritage up the hill: the FW11 chassis 02 that Nigel Mansell drove to three grand prix wins in 1986, and on Sunday the FW18 championship car — the chassis that took five pole positions and four wins before becoming the team's spare car in late 1996 — shared with current Williams team principal James Vowles.
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