When Romain Dumas whistled to the top of the fabled 12.42-mile Pikes Peak hillclimb in a time of 8m53.553s, there were mixed emotions in the Ford camp. His Ford F-150 Lightning SuperTruck had set the fastest time of the event on one hand, but on the other, the Frenchman’s time could have been even quicker.
An unprecedented, brief, glitch with a sensor in the battery management system – while Dumas was passing through a dead zone on the mountain that inhibited the transmission of its on-board live telemetry – forced him to a halt and is estimated to have cost 26s before he got going again. That explains a 5.871s deficit to the time Dumas set in the outlandish SuperVan 4.2 in 2023.
