This Prodrive-Tuned WRX STI Has Just Cracked A Sub-7-Minute Nurburgring Lap

We always enjoy a good ‘faster than’ comparison, and while it’s not necessarily a surprise that a highly tuned ‘ordinary’ car is faster than a supercar, the fact that a four-door saloon can best Italian and Japanese legends around the world’s most infamous racetrack is worthy of a nod.

The British motorsport and Subaru tuning wizards at Prodrive have sent a time-attack WRX STI around the 12.8-mile Nurburgring loop in a staggering 6m57.5s. That’s faster than the Lamborghini Aventador SV, Nissan GT-R Nismo, Mercedes AMG GT R and all sorts of high-powered stuff. It’s just half a second slower over the long lap than the Porsche 918 Spyder, and it’s now the fastest four-door car ever to try its hand on the German track.

The four-cylinder boxer engine blocks Subaru uses are strong enough to unlock vast extra potential – with modified internals, at least. And boy, does this car have mods. At its heart it’s a standard all-wheel drive 2017 WRX STI with a 2.0-litre boxer lump, but then a full roll cage is welded in, the suspension is changed for race-spec kit, the tyres are switched for nine-inch slicks and the engine is upgraded to the tune of ‘more than 600bhp’ at a screaming 8500rpm.

It’s running 25psi of boost and sucks air through a 75mm intake. Thanks to an incredibly advanced WRC-spec gearbox modified to be used with paddle-shifters, it can swap cogs in a mind-boggling 20-25 milliseconds. That’s quite quick.

You might recognise it as the same car that smashed the four-wheeled Isle of Man TT course record, only without the wrap and with a different aerodynamics package. Geared for maximum overall lap time potential around the track, it tops out at ‘just’ 179mph but produces as much as 295kg of downforce when it does – more than the Lotus Evora GT430, which is only fair since the Subaru isn’t actually road legal. Either way, it’s now a multiple record-bursting beast.