Ford hasn’t had it all its own way at Pikes Peak. But when the F-150 Lightning SuperTruck won the Race To The Clouds last year (with Romain Dumas driving) you did start to worry for the hill climb’s future, particularly with regard to its famously broad-minded Unlimited division, which does what it says on the tin. Sure, the SuperTruck wasn’t the quickest thing ever recorded – but with that claim to fame safely in the hands of VW thanks to the spectacular sub-8-minute I.D. R run in 2018 (also Dumas), the idea that the world’s most famous hillclimb might end up solely the preserve of battery-powered machinery was not a particularly cheery thought.
And with the firm returning to Colorado in 2025 with the Ford Performance Super Mustang Mach-E Electric Demonstrator, a car that it promised would be ‘leaner, lighter and with a new kind of edge’, it seemed like the tipping point might already have arrived. After all, here was another three-motor, +1,400hp monster capable of generating more than three tonnes of downforce at 150mph – what hope anything else? ‘We come to Pikes Peak to win,’ said Ford. ‘And the electric platform is the way to do it.’
Well, not this year. Granted, the event was effectively running at half mast thanks to high winds further up the mountain, but regardless, the Dumas and his winged, lighter-by-100kg Mustang Mach-E could only manage second place overall. Even better, it wasn’t beaten by another major OEM-sponsored EV, but by an Italian chap driving a little-known French prototype powered by a conventional V6 – Sacrebleu!
Okay, so Simone Faggioli is an 11-time European Hill Climb champion and Nova Proto is an internationally renowned builder of specialised hill climb cars – and the NP01 is its flagship model, and is said to be powered in this instance by an 800hp bi-turbo V6 – but still. Internal combustion (and watching the video above, you’ll certainly hear fuel and air being mixed and combusted at a frenetic rate) defeating the dreary movement of electrons between battery terminals is always a satisfying moment. Probably just a blip in a timeline that ends with EV domination at Pikes Peak, of course – but congratulations to Faggioli on his first outright title and to the 500ish-kilogram car that got him there.