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Written by Ollie Kew
It probably hasn"t escaped your attention that the N rburgring production car lap record battle has gone utterly insane in 2017. After Lamborghini stunned us all with a 6min 52.01sec lap in March, we assumed it"d go quiet, but Chinese start-up NextEV"s Nio EP9 managed to beat its 7min 5sec personal best with a 6min 45.9sec run last month, only to have its title snatched away by Kenny Brack"s 6min 43.2sec effort in the McLaren P1 LM. Where will it end?Amidst the furor of times, tyres, and what exactly constitutes a production car", TG.com spoke to NextEV hotshoe, former Le Mans and DTM racer and extremely modest and good egg Peter Dumbreck about his Ring exploits. Could the electric newcomer fight back? Oh yes, as it turns outTopGear.com: Peter, how the merry flip did you take an already blistering 7min 5sec lap down to a 6min 45sec record? Has the latest Nio EP9 got new motors? More power?Peter Dumbreck: "The motors are the same [as the ones used when the Nio EP9 did a 7min 5sec lap], but I wasn"t getting one megawatt of power (1,340bhp) for the full lap. We have to think about how long the lap is, how long the battery will last, and what my top speed will be. A combustion engine burns a lot of fuel at top speed, likewise, it burns" a lot of batteries pushing a car through the air. So they can"t let me have full power, because it"d burn the batteries out so quickly. "They optimise the power I get for the full lap, and how quickly the batteries will heat up. Once we reach a certain temperature, we"re doing damage to the batteries. I was getting somewhere around 700bhp. We"re on specific NextEV tyres to withstand the weight and G-force, but aerodynamically, the car is the same as it was before." TG: So same car, same driver, same track why twenty seconds quicker?PD: "One of the big things was I had more time in the car. When you"ve got an electric car and that kind of power, we do one lap on one charge. Seven minutes in the car. You can"t run lap after lap after lap getting quicker and quicker. I start around the corner, having gone the wrong way down the track, line the car up, then say, get ready here I come". I have to push right from the start. I"ve still only done eight laps of the N rburgring in this car, across three separate days. And the second day I only got one lap because it was soaking wet. "If you look at the Porsche 918 [6min 57sec], they ran day after day after day, whittling the time down, but we had to get it right [straight away]. The homework was done at the factory, we did two days testing in good weather, and the pressure was on. I was thinking I"ll do what I can", but it quickly became apparent that the outright record was on. On lap one I took four seconds off my previous record, after lap two I took another seven seconds off it, and then I took nine seconds off it, and that was me giving it everything, throwing caution to the wind.
Date written: 5 Jun 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 8029
It probably hasn"t escaped your attention that the N rburgring production car lap record battle has gone utterly insane in 2017. After Lamborghini stunned us all with a 6min 52.01sec lap in March, we assumed it"d go quiet, but Chinese start-up NextEV"s Nio EP9 managed to beat its 7min 5sec personal best with a 6min 45.9sec run last month, only to have its title snatched away by Kenny Brack"s 6min 43.2sec effort in the McLaren P1 LM. Where will it end?Amidst the furor of times, tyres, and what exactly constitutes a production car", TG.com spoke to NextEV hotshoe, former Le Mans and DTM racer and extremely modest and good egg Peter Dumbreck about his Ring exploits. Could the electric newcomer fight back? Oh yes, as it turns outTopGear.com: Peter, how the merry flip did you take an already blistering 7min 5sec lap down to a 6min 45sec record? Has the latest Nio EP9 got new motors? More power?Peter Dumbreck: "The motors are the same [as the ones used when the Nio EP9 did a 7min 5sec lap], but I wasn"t getting one megawatt of power (1,340bhp) for the full lap. We have to think about how long the lap is, how long the battery will last, and what my top speed will be. A combustion engine burns a lot of fuel at top speed, likewise, it burns" a lot of batteries pushing a car through the air. So they can"t let me have full power, because it"d burn the batteries out so quickly. "They optimise the power I get for the full lap, and how quickly the batteries will heat up. Once we reach a certain temperature, we"re doing damage to the batteries. I was getting somewhere around 700bhp. We"re on specific NextEV tyres to withstand the weight and G-force, but aerodynamically, the car is the same as it was before." TG: So same car, same driver, same track why twenty seconds quicker?PD: "One of the big things was I had more time in the car. When you"ve got an electric car and that kind of power, we do one lap on one charge. Seven minutes in the car. You can"t run lap after lap after lap getting quicker and quicker. I start around the corner, having gone the wrong way down the track, line the car up, then say, get ready here I come". I have to push right from the start. I"ve still only done eight laps of the N rburgring in this car, across three separate days. And the second day I only got one lap because it was soaking wet. "If you look at the Porsche 918 [6min 57sec], they ran day after day after day, whittling the time down, but we had to get it right [straight away]. The homework was done at the factory, we did two days testing in good weather, and the pressure was on. I was thinking I"ll do what I can", but it quickly became apparent that the outright record was on. On lap one I took four seconds off my previous record, after lap two I took another seven seconds off it, and then I took nine seconds off it, and that was me giving it everything, throwing caution to the wind.
Date written: 5 Jun 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 8029
