Having smashed the all-time record at Pikes Peak last month, the I.D. R was expected to be among the quickest runners at the 2018 Festival of Speed - and it hasn't let the side down. On Saturday, with Roman Dumas again driving, it whined its way to a 43.05 secs time over the famed 1.1-mile course, shattering the previous record for electric cars.
The fact that it is only 1.45 secs behind the best-ever effort registered by Nick Heidfeld in 1999 driving a McLaren MP4/13, just goes to show how monumentally fast Volkswagen's custom-built hill climber really is. On the official list of Sunday Shootout winners, only Graeme Wight, Jr has gone quicker against the clock - and that was in a similarly specialised machine (the Hill Climb Championship-winning Gould GR51).
And that was practice. On Sunday the I.D. R and Dumas repeated the feat in the final shootout, managing a 43.86 secs run to make it the first electric car to win the event outright. In a sign of the times, it was an electric car in second place, too - the remarkable NIO EP9 with Peter Dumbreck driving, which had briefly held the zero-emission record itself with a 44.45sec time on Saturday (followed by a 44.32 on Sunday). Hard cheese in one sense - but still reportedly the fastest time ever set by a road car on slicks at the Festival of Speed.