Watch The Czinger 21C Break Goodwood’s Road Car Record

The tandem two-seater, 1233bhp hypercar has gone faster than anything else with number plates up the Duke of Richmond’s driveway

Mike Bartholomew

15 Jul 2024

Czinger 21C leaves the start line at Goodwood

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is over for another year, which means that once all the attendees have had a big sleep and come to terms with their enormous sunburn and/or dried off their clothes, it’s time to digest the results of the all-important timed shootout. Unsurprisingly, nothing’s managed to best the ludicrous 39.081sec run achieved by the McMurtry Spéirling in 2022, but one record has fallen this year: the Czinger 21C is the new road car record-holder.

The 21C is the first product of Los Angeles-based upstart Czinger, and is notable for quite a few reasons. For one, it makes 1233bhp from a combination of a 2.9-litre twin-turbo V8 and trio of electric motors. It also features a tandem two-seater layout, and over 350 of its components are made using 3D printing.

You can now add a Goodwood record to that list. Driver Chris Ward hauled the 21C up the narrow, 1.16-mile hillclimb course in 48.82 seconds in Sunday’s timed shootout, which sees a collection of the fastest things at the Festival of Speed every year go all out on timed runs.

That’s not only a new road car record - knocking nearly half a second off the time of the previous production record holder, the Rimac Nevera - but it was the fifth-fastest time of 2024 overall. It beat several bonafide race cars, including a Ferrari 296 Challenge, BMW M4 GT3 and a 1970s Lotus 77 Formula 1 car.

The only things to go quicker during the official timed sessions were the Pikes Peak-spec Alpine A110, a Porsche 911 Carrera Cup car, Subaru’s mad ‘Project Midnight’ WRX special, and the electric Ford Transit SuperVan 4.2, which Romain Dumas hustled to the fastest time of the day at 43.98 seconds.

Just 80 21Cs will be made, split between the track-focused version that set the record and a long-tailed V Max edition that will chase outright top speed. It starts at around $2 million, or roughly £1.5 million, and is the first of what Czinger plans to be a series of low-volume models, including a four-seater grand tourer.

With so many fascinating hypercars on the horizon, we suspect this won’t be the last time we see this record tumble over the next few years.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.