Goodwood Festival of Speed: $2.3 million Lotus hypercar in DRAMATIC hill climb crash

Goodwood Festival of speed entrance 2023 — Photo: © IMAGO

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$2.3 million hypercar in DRAMATIC crash at Goodwood Festival of Speed

The incident occured at the famous festival on Thursday

Simmey Hannifin Donaldson F1 Editor

Motorsport journalist covering F1 since 2024

Saturday 13 July 2024 10:57 Updated: 19:57

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A multi-million-pound car crashed just seconds into its attempt at the famous Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb on Thursday.

The annual motorsport event is taking place this week following the conclusion of last weekend's British Grand Prix and is spread across four days at the Goodwood Estate in Chichester.

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Proceedings got underway on Thursday, with the festival set to continue through until Sunday and feature six Formula 1 teams.

One iconic part of the Goodwood event is the 'hill climb', which sees a variety of different cars and motorbikes take on a 1.16-mile hill, with a shootout at the end of the weekend to see who can do it the fastest.

Currently, the hill climb record is held by former F1 driver Max Chilton, who set a time of 0:39:08 in the McMurtry Speirling back in 2022.

Adrian Newey's RB17 was unveiled at Goodwood this week

$2.3 million crash at Goodwood Festival of Speed

On Thursday, the hill climb was attempted by Lotus with their Evija X Prototype, a car that recently completed the Nurburgring Nordschleife in a mightily impressive 6:24.047 and that reportedly cost a whopping $2.3 million.

Just seconds into the climb, however, things went badly wrong, with the driver of the extremely powerful vehicle losing control of the car.

Thankfully, Lotus later confirmed in a statement released to Road and Track that the driver of the vehicle was unharmed.

Six F1 teams are set to feature at Goodwood this year

The statement read: "Evija X is a one-off track version of our electric hypercar, Evija; one of the most powerful production cars in the world. The Evija X took part in a hill run at Goodwood Festival of Speed on Thursday, 11th July, where it was involved in an incident at the start line.

"Following a formal evaluation by both Goodwood and Lotus, asymmetric grip caused by overcorrection during rapid acceleration at the start line was determined to be the cause. Driver was unharmed in the incident and there was minimal damage to the car."

Lotus also confirmed that could the track special be repaired, they would have three more days to make runs up the hill in the car.