The NextEV ‘Nio EP9’ Would Be The Overall ‘Ring Record Holder If It Wasn’t For One Crucial Detail

There’s one thing I couldn’t help but wonder when news of NextEV’s very first car - the Nio EP9 - dropped today. Shouldn’t it be a little bit quicker?

I’m not talking about the staggering 0-124mph time of 7.1 seconds, nor the 196mph top speed. No, I’m referring to the Nurburgring lap time. Sure, the 7min 5.16sec lap has crowned the EP9 as the electric vehicle lap record holder, but shouldn’t a 1341bhp hypercar be quicker than that? Particularly in a world where a Lamborghini Aventador SV with around half the power can clock a 6min 58sec effort.

Now we have our answer: it turns out the lap wasn’t at maximum attack, and it’s all down to the temperatures of the EP9’s battery cells, which make up 648kg of the car’s 1800kg mass.

Speaking to us at the car’s reveal in London today, NextEV Formula E driver and EP9 test driver Nelson Piquet Jr said: “We’re not at maximum power at any point of the lap, otherwise we’d heat up the batteries too much.” A figure of “90 per cent or less” is suggested, to which Senior Design Director David Hilton says what we we’ve all been thinking: “Imagine what it could do on 100.”

The answer is an astonishing lap time. “If you took away the heat issues I think we could get to the ultimate lap record,” Piquet says, adding: “At [Paul] Ricard we were only a couple of seconds slower than the LMP2 cars. I’m sure if you put an LMP2 car at the Nurburgring it’s going to be quicker than the 6 minute 40-something lap.” And the lap time they’re talking about is the 6min 48sec lap set by the Radical SR8 LM a few years ago - a car that’s pretty much a racing car with a set of numberplates chucked on.

Gerry Hughes - Chief Race Engineer and Team Principle of NextEV’s Formula E team - adds: “The biggest challenge when driving electric vehicles at performance is thermal management. It’s simply the biggest issue - there’s no difference in Formula E.”

So for now the likes of the Lamborghini Aventador SV and the Porsche 918 Spyder are ‘safe’, but as battery technology improves, the fastest car around the Green Hell could end up being powered by electricity alone…