Jaguar TCS Racing brought its Gen4 Formula E challenger to the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Thursday and handed it to Fernando Barrichello, the FIA Formula 3 racer and son of Formula One race winner Rubens Barrichello, for a run up the hill. Formula E's broadcast presented the day as the first chance for fans to get a proper look at the car, and Goodwood is a strange but effective place to do it. There is no grandstand distance here. The hillclimb runs about 1.86 km with nine turns and climbs roughly 93 metres, one car at a time, past spectators standing close enough to hear the tyres load up. A new race car has nowhere to hide on it.
Goodwood has been a useful measuring stick for electric racing hardware for a while now. The outright hill record, 39.081 seconds, was set in 2022 by Max Chilton in the electric McMurtry Speirling, and it displaced a Formula One time from 1999 that had stood for two decades. The Formula E class record is a much softer target. Nick Heidfeld set it at 48.59 seconds in 2017 driving a Mahindra M4 Electro, which makes the class mark nine years old. Both figures come from the event's published records rather than from the broadcast. That is the context that makes a Gen4 demonstration run interesting beyond the spectacle. Formula E has spent a decade making the case that its cars improve faster than anyone expects, and a hill with three decades of timing data is one of the few places the claim can be checked in public. The festival has been running since 1993, when the estate's owner staged a hillclimb because he could not get a permit to race on the neighbouring circuit, and attendance is now capped in the region of 150,000 people across the weekend.
The broadcast commentary framed the Gen4 against the series' own history. In early Formula E, drivers ran two cars in a single race, climbing out of one and into the other partway through, because the battery could not go the distance. The commentators described the Gen4 as running a full race on one car with a substantial power increase over the Gen1 machine and a meaningful step over Gen3 as well. They also suggested the car will be quick enough that some of the tight street circuits the series has raced on will no longer suit it, pointing to a revised calendar and venues such as Brands Hatch. Ahead of the weekend's timed shootout, the commentary flagged Dan Ticktum as a driver worth watching, with speculation about the single seater mark, which the event's records list as a 41.60 second run by a McLaren Formula One car in 1999. Thursday's run was a demonstration rather than a timed attempt, and the broadcast did not present a lap time for the Gen4. Some of the specifics the commentators reached for, including how much power the car makes relative to earlier generations, were framed as expectations rather than confirmed figures, and Jaguar has not published a full specification for the car.
Bottom line: Demonstration runs are marketing, and everyone involved knows it. But Formula E has an image problem that no press release solves, which is that a large slice of racing fans still price the cars against where the series started rather than where it is. Putting the Gen4 on a hill that has hosted Formula One machinery for thirty years, in front of people who can hear it, is a smarter argument than any horsepower figure. If Jaguar wants to make the point stick, put the thing on the clock. The Formula E class record is nine years old and looks ready to fall.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.