What it takes to set a Nurburgring lap record, from the man who did it in a VW Golf
VW’s mission was to make the Golf GTI Edition 50 its fastest car ever around the Nordschleife – no matter what it took
The relevance of Nurburgring lap times is an age-old argument that’ll keep on burning until the end of time. Some manufacturers swear by them, while others dismiss them as a trivial humblebrag with little real-world relevance.
But the fact that Volkswagen, undisputed originators of the hot-hatch genre, got quite so serious about smashing its own Nordschleife record a specific target for its latest GTI Edition 50 – its self-branded “most competitive GTI to date” – tells you all you need to know about the mood within Wolfsburg.
The car built to celebrate GTI’s 50th birthday recently ran a 7:46.13 time, beating a record set by its Mk7 Clubsport S predecessor (below) almost 10 years ago. The fact that VW’s latest family car can run quicker than that stripped out, two-seat race-car-in-disguise shows the mind-bending progress firms are making.
There’s no sign VW’s about to change tack, either. On the recent GTI Edition 50 launch, we caught up with the man who set those two lap records, a decade apart. Volkswagen test driver and touring-car racer Benny Leuchter told us he thinks the GTI 50 can still go “two to two-and-a-half seconds faster” in the right conditions.
“The day we went for [the record], you could see the weather coming in,” he told us. “We had to go for it; we only had one lap”.
To ensure the Golf GTI Edition 50 gave everything it could, Leuchter let us into a little secret: “We lowered the rear seats,” he told Auto Express with a smirk. “We wanted to get the centre of gravity as low as possible”. Don’t believe it? You can just about make out the dropped rear bench in VW’s highlight reel of the lap record on YouTube. We didn’t ask how much weight all the camera kit added – maybe that’s where the extra two seconds will come from…
If the latest Edition 50 – and VW’s recent assurance that it’ll re-engineer its EA888 2.0-litre turbo engine for a range of future hot hatchbacks – is a sign of things to come, we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Fancy yourself a slice of Volkswagen’s latest hot hatch? We’ve got a selection of GTI and R models available to buy now via the Auto Express Buy a Car service…
