What really happened to the Lotus Evija X at the Festival of Speed?

The Evija X had already been out for its debut run at Goodwood on Thursday morning as part of the Supercar Run, and everything had gone very much to plan. After a successful burnout away from the line it made its way up the Hill with little drama, and everything was set for more of the same when it returned in the afternoon.

By now we’ve all seen what happened at the start of that second run; an unfortunate incident that has gone viral on social media. But what actually happened? We spoke to the team at Lotus to find out the finer details of the Evija X’s regrettable connection with the straw bales.

Let’s first take you back to one week ago, when Lotus introduced the driver to the car they would be driving at the Festival of Speed. Planned were a number of testing days at the manufacturer’s test base at Hethel, a chance to familiarise with the car’s systems and astonishing performance. Based at a race track, however, the requirements of both car and driver were fundamentally different to what would be asked of them on the Goodwood Hill.

The Evija X is no ordinary car. It may be based on the same tub as the road-going Evija, with the same transmission and electric powertrain, but the engineering around those elements is entirely focused on maximising lap time with stronger brakes and slick tyres. It’s a car designed to maintain traction and grip rather than develop a wall of tyre smoke, and in almost every way entirely unrecognisable from its road-going namesake.

Coming up to the Start Line then, the act of turning off the traction control was already an alien concept to both car and driver. It also means there is absolutely zero response from the car in the case of tyre slip. The driver is very much on their own and in full control of the car.

As we saw on the Evija X’s first run, that doesn’t make it an undrivable beast, but it does make it far less predictable. You’d certainly want to be working from a consistent base when the time comes to put your foot down.

Before that fateful second run, however, the build-up was stifled by a stalled Solus GT, which meant the Evija X had to circumvent the stationary car in order to line up, at a slight angle, on the Start Line.

That didn’t stop the driver from fully committing when given the signal to go. Data traces show that they immediately jumped to 100 per cent torque demand from all four of its electric motors. That’s an instant injection of 1,704Nm (1,257lb ft), not limited by a rev limiter, which within a few metres had spun the rear wheels up to 170mph and the fronts to 150mph. The resulting burnout was quite something, while it lasted.

The reason it didn’t last was quite a simple one. The driver unfortunately lost control. The Evija X is capable of reaching a top speed of 240mph, and the energy involved in that power delivery was simply too extreme. As the driver begun to lift off the throttle to try and search for some traction, the balance of the car shifted and pitched it into the bales. In total, the incident from the start to the impact was about 1.5 seconds. The driver was unfortunately unable to maintain control.

It’s perhaps something of a wake-up call to all of us just how easy it can be for something like this to occur. Have we become blind to the skills of all of these drivers who put on such an extraordinary show for us mere mortals watching? In plenty of cases, much like the Evija X, the car itself is not designed for these tyre-shredding moments either.

The good news of course is that nobody was hurt. The integrity of the cockpit was unaffected and the driver walked away. The car in fact was, aside from a single bodywork panel, entirely undamaged, and would have been able to run again if not for post-incident protocol which requires the car to be properly checked over.

We’ll appreciate the efforts of these drivers a little more from now on, as they deal with the challenge of controlling 2000PS track monsters like the Evija X in alien circumstances, within the emotionally charged confines of the Goodwood Festival of Speed.