Electric cars win again at Pike’s Peak as Super Mustang Mach-E gets its revenge
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- Ford's Super Mustang Mach-E won the 2026 Pike's Peak International Hill Climb overall with a time of 8:18.202, beating every gas-powered car up the 12.42-mile hill and claiming the "King of the Mountain" title.
- Romain Dumas — the same driver who set the all-time electric record of 7:57.148 in Volkswagen's ID.R back in 2018 — piloted the EV to an 11+ second victory over 2nd-place Robin Shute (a former Tesla and Faraday Future engineer) in the open-wheel Sendycar V1.
- Last year's race saw the Super Mustang Mach-E win its class but lose overall to Simone Faggioli's ultralight Nova Proto NP01 by 5 seconds, after high winds forced officials to close the upper half of the course — a handicap that disproportionately hurt EVs, which gain more time at higher altitudes.
- The Super Mustang Mach-E is a 1,400-hp custom GT racecar that "bears roughly zero resemblance" to the consumer Mustang Mach-E, and it beat Ford's previous SuperVan time of 8:47.682 (also set by Dumas) by nearly 30 seconds, though the two competed in different classes.
- EVs have long dominated Pike's Peak because the summit sits at 14,110 ft, where thinner air starves gas engines of oxygen for combustion — a handicap that doesn't apply to electric powertrains, which is why the all-time record is held by a battery-powered prototype.
- Evasive Motorsports' Ioniq 5N also entered the 2026 race but was unable to compete on race day after being damaged during practice sessions.
Why it matters: The result is the cleanest possible test of the high-altitude EV thesis: the upper half of the course was open in 2026 but closed in 2025, and Ford's Super Mustang Mach-E flipped a 5-second overall deficit into an 11+ second overall win against the same prototype class of gas-powered competition. For Ford specifically, it confirms the decision to graduate from show-pony SuperVans/SuperTrucks to a purpose-built racecar, with Dumas now 21 seconds off his own 2018 EV record in a completely different machine.
