Sorry but I’m going to talk about a Lamborghini and the Nürburgring again.
I know: if there was something bigger going on this week – something interesting involving a popular tellybox programme or something – I’d have written about that instead, but it’s a slow news week. Barely a mention of cars in the media.
So here I am, talking about the Nürburgring (apologies) and specifically, a lap time Lamborghini set in its Aventador LP750-4 Superveloce – sub-seven minutes, or 6min 59.73sec, to be exact.
That’s only two seconds slower than a Porsche 918 Spyder, which is, in turn, probably about as quick as a LaFerrari or a McLaren P1, if we were allowed to know how fast they are.
Lamborghini grabbed an opportunity with the SV. A Pirelli test driver – an apparently brave and certainly talented man called Marco Mapelli – phoned Lamborghini’s head of development, Maurizio Reggiani, and said words to the effect of: “The track’s free and I’ve got a GoPro. Shall I?”
Reggiani said yes. If you watch one Nürburgring lap video this year, and it’s obviously far from compulsory, make it this one. Mapelli’s Pirellis look like they start to go off halfway around the circuit, and the SV gets quite hairy.
Reggiani says it’s obvious from the video that this lairiness cost Mapelli and the SV a few seconds. A few seconds, I noted, that would make the £321,743, 740bhp Aventador quicker than the £704,000, 875bhp Porsche (although not as quick as the Radical that holds the production car record outright).
So, Maurizio, would you fancy another crack at a lap time? Reggiani pauses. Says it’s not so easy to book the Nürburgring exclusively these days, you know. It’s very busy. It’s quite expensive…
Sure it is. Lamborghini, like Porsche, is part of the Volkswagen Group and I’m sure Volkswagen, one of the world’s biggest and richest car companies, which somehow managed to blag enough time to conduct the 918 Spyder tests, struggles to get a free Nürburgring minute to itself these days, right?
No. It has been advised against letting an old-school V12 beat a hybrid hypercar.
Following a race accident earlier this year, in which a car became airborne and a spectator died, the Nürburgring now has speed limits through certain sections during races, although I’m told they’re not enforced when car makers hire the place.
The review of these limits at the end of the year will be crucial. If anything more than spectator areas is changed, it might not just be choice that prevents people chasing the existing benchmark.
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