Ford Unveils Supervan At Goodwood
For the latest Goodwood Festival of Speed, Ford have unveiled the new electric Transit Custom based Supervan for competitions around the world.
By far the most powerful van ever made by Ford, this showcases just what can be done with electric motors and a whole load of cool tech!
2000 BHP?
Driving the electric Supervan are four electric motors that between them deliver an obscene, 2000 brake horsepower - making it far and away the most powerful van that Ford have ever produced for track or road use.
When you put that much power onto the track you also need top end suspension, brakes and tyres. While the Supervan looks like a Transit Custom on steroids, you won’t find the top end racing brakes or suspension on a normal van unless you’ve a few quid to spend and upgrade it yourself.
Tech Making It Work
Though young men who like to wear their baseball caps backwards may have a pop at adding the hardware to make their own Transit Custom a lot more thuggish on the roads, it’s unlikely they’ll get the other tech together without a pile of extra cash.
With the Transit Custom’s standard SYNC touchscreen controller fitted, the Supervan has five drive control settings - road, track, drift, drag, and rally. These control the power to the wheels in such a way as to optimise road conditions. You will likely find similar settings on a Tesla (though certainly not rally mode!) but Ford have gone a step further with live over-the-air tuning.
This is where things get silly. The engineers in the pits can tune the Supervan by accessing its ECU while it drives on the track. This could mean for instance, altering the power output on a wet track in track mode or optimising it for different racing circuits (one set of tweaks for Silverstone and another for the Nurburgring for example). This goes far beyond throwing money and hardware at it and into the realm of Formula 1 car racing!
Nurburgring and Beyond
With all this tech and hardware, as well as French racing driver Romain Dumas at the wheel, we can expect to see the Supervan causing a bit of a stir in the coming months and years! Watch this space as we report on future records broken…
