百年福特 福特SuperVan 4.2刷新Bathurst單圈紀錄 | Ford Performance

Mt. Panorama, home to legends 6.2km of twisting, sinuous tarmac Not a place to bring a van to break the closed car lap record, surely But this is not just any transit van This is the Ford Performance Transit Supervan 4.2 A fully electric, 2000hp behemoth And it's being driven by none other than multiple Le Mans winner Romain Dumas This is Mt. Panorama And this is one of the most challenging tracks in the world It is such a spectacle It's the top of the tree And no doubt globally it certainly has a special place in a lot of drivers' hearts We had run the Supervan 4.2 at Pikes Peak in Colorado in June of 23 Where it set the open class record In keeping with that tradition We'd like to go really really fast up another mountain And see what we can learn First of all some rough summary Global summary of the vehicle specification When Supervan arrived at Bathurst The time to beat was a 1 minute 58 But then plans changed A new benchmark had been set With a competitor clocking a 1 minute 56.60 There was work to be done Supervan was not designed or built to be on a race track like that It's Pikes Peak So it means Pikes Peak A lot of power As we can see the van is high, it's big But it's a van So we have to adapt the van to our race track So we took out a lot of downforce compared to Pikes Peak Because Pikes Peak's top speed is 240 km per hour Here it's a lot more But again to adapt this big van for this small road It was a lot of work and it's still a lot of work Romain comes with so many credentials In what he's accomplished in motorsports But what I think really sets him apart And what has helped him be successful In those different forms of motorsports Is his attention to detail But it ultimately pays off When it all comes together After weeks or months of work To one lap And being able to feel comfortable, confident And get it done and set the record The turning is responding And suddenly when you are on the corner And so when you look You want to open to go into the, you know, on the outside We were finding the limits on our steering system There's a lot of assist that's required On a heavy vehicle with this kind of aerodynamic load And this kind of track really puts the loading On a different level to Pikes Peak And other tracks we've been to And so now we're finding that The steering motor is not able to keep up There's a lot of tuning and work to be done That is so circuit specific It's like nowhere else This combination of bumps and elevation changes And high speed sections and low speed sections It's just unique And it's definitely a challenge Last week the power steering On a kind of track like that With a lot of elevation and a lot of load on the tires The power steering was a little bit saturating So this guy has to work very, very hard To change it and to modify it As soon as we finished running We immediately started to design a new system Did that overnight, Saturday, Sunday And then we dispatched a member of our team to Austria To get a few parts One team member has gone to Japan And is on his way back now And we have our partners at DJR In the supercar series Helping us out with manufacturing a few of these parts So we're getting parts from three different places Three different continents actually Now that you think about it All coming together here To make this thing go as fast as we can The goal for this weekend is to just Push this thing to its limits We want to go faster than we did last weekend And we're going to push to go as fast as we can First time we do a fast lap We'll enjoy for sure Time was 1.56.7 Which is agonizingly close But we didn't quite break the record Romain pushed hard But ultimately came up agonizingly short We try another time, right? We were out of time on the track And out of hope for the result But miracles can come true A call to the organizers resulted In 10 more minutes of track time But there were no fresh tires left And track temperatures were beginning to rise It was now or never He was back And the record had been broken By just under 0.3 of a second Unbelievable To come here to Mount Panorama With what a spectacular track this is With a challenge of going this fast This is faster than we even thought we could go It's just a great testament to the team This full electric e-transit super van It's just incredible what it's able to do Unbelievable We're just all super pumped to do this It took a big global effort We had engineers working out of Sweden Dearborn, Europe and Vienna And Austria, Australia It's been a huge global effort From the Ford Performance team And it has taken all of us to make this happen So great, great teamwork Well, this morning already with 56.6 We said we were all very impressed But in one side we were a little bit disappointed Because it was missing 1.5 tenths So suddenly we realized we should do and try again So we said OK, we try And we see it's only one lap And the lap went well I mean, it was some moment But it was OK I mean, at the end of the day I think it's great for Ford For this super van Again, make something special And for the team