Scott Speed had exactly one shot at the Mount Washington Auto Road on Sunday. He needed 5 minutes and 11.982 seconds, and he needed it to count.
It did. Speed, driving the Vermont SportsCar-built Subaru WRX: Project Midnight, posted a 5:11.982 at the 2026 Paul Giblin Memorial Climb to the Clouds, erasing Travis Pastrana’s 2021 overall benchmark of 5:28.67 by 16.688 seconds. Subaru has now claimed the overall record at Climb to the Clouds in five consecutive appearances, a streak that traces through David Higgins’ runs in 2011 and 2014 and Pastrana’s resets in 2017 and 2021.
The conditions Sunday made the margin more impressive. Fog blanketed the upper mountain before competitors could begin their first full runs, and organizers shortened the course to mid-mountain for the morning session. That left the afternoon ascent as the only opportunity to register a full-course time. Speed, who ran last in the field, had two days of half-course practice and a single full-mountain run to show for the weekend. He made it count by a wide margin.
“After I saw the time, it feels awesome,” Speed said. “I’m glad to be able to throw down a time that was so much faster than any of us expected. This was a big mental challenge for me.”
The car he drove is purpose-built for exactly this kind of event. Project Midnight debuted at the 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed and went on to earn back-to-back Goodwood Hillclimb Shootout podiums as the fastest internal-combustion entry. Vermont SportsCar built it as the quickest WRX race car Subaru Motorsports USA has ever fielded, combining extreme weight reduction, a highly developed Subaru Boxer powertrain, and aerodynamics tuned for short tarmac sprints. The 7.6-mile Mount Washington Auto Road, now fully paved after its final gravel section was surfaced following the 2021 event, suited Project Midnight’s tarmac-focused package better than it would have the mixed-surface setup Pastrana used five years ago. Pastrana ran the 2021 record on a course that still included roughly a mile of unpaved road in his 862 hp Airslayer STI. Speed’s run came on an all-asphalt version of the same mountain.
Tire selection was part of the preparation. Yokohama developed bespoke options specifically for the Mount Washington attempt, and Speed chose the Yokohama ADVAN A005 slick, a compound derived from the company’s road-racing slick platform. On a 7.6-mile run where tire wear is essentially a non-issue, the brief is pure grip from the start line to the summit: immediate heat buildup, maximum mechanical adhesion, nothing held in reserve.
Speed brought relevant credentials to the event beyond his previous appearances with Subaru. A former Formula One driver and rallycross champion, he has experience across the specific disciplines Mount Washington demands: high-speed aerodynamic loading, technical braking zones, and the mental compression of a run where a single mistake ends the only attempt you are going to get.
“With us going last, you can wait until it looks clear at the top and it still might not matter, because it takes five minutes to get there,” Speed said. “This was the only time I ran the full mountain this weekend, and a lot of things had to go right.”
The Climb to the Clouds, dating to 1904, is one of North America’s oldest motorsport events. Subaru has turned it into something close to a house event. Five appearances, five overall records. Project Midnight is the latest instrument of that streak, and Sunday’s margin suggests it has not been pushed to its limit yet.
Source: Subaru. Images courtesy of Subaru.
