The VW ID R Corners So Hard You'll Pass Out At The Wheel

The slick-shod Volkswagen ID R has been driven by a journalist from Top Gear magazine, and it corners so hard that he briefly passed out...

Matt Kimberley

29 Oct 2018

The VW ID R Corners So Hard You'll Pass Out At The Wheel

Volkswagen’s ID R generates enough cornering grip to make you pass out at the wheel, according to a journalist who recently took the wheel.

Top Gear journalist Ollie Marriage has become just the third person in the world – and the first outside Volkswagen – to drive the prototype that smashed the Pikes Peak hill-climb record recently, and it wasn’t solely about the joy of accelerative organ reorganisation.

The ID R’s epic aero kit produces more than the car’s weight in downforce, so it’s always going to corner pretty briskly.

Recounting his efforts in exploring the phenomenal 670bhp car’s performance on a large, open and well-surfaced space with nothing to hit but traffic cones, Marriage explains in a new feature how had been building up his corner speed before trying something at close to the 137mph limited top speed. He writes:

“There’s one bend out here I can take at near max speed, and because I can, I just shut off the self-preservation voices in my head and turn-in hard. And the car simply… turns. Without delay or scrub or slip. My head, body and internal organs follow the laws of centrifugal force.
“The split second after turn-in is alarming, terrifying even, but then, because the corner is long, my brain does something funny. It relaxes. It tells me all’s fine and I should take some time out, kick back, have a nap.
“And then, as I straighten up, my brain snaps back to attention, synapses whirr and I wake up gasping, as if I’d had a nightmare and sat bolt upright in bed. It’s weird.
“When I pull over for a rest I ask Dieter Depping, the car’s test driver (and the only bloke besides Romain and I ever to have driven the car) what’s going on. He informs me with a smile that what I’m experiencing is G-loc – loss of consciousness through g-force. That’s the kind of cornering speeds the ID R is capable of delivering. It’s mad.”

Probably not something to try on public roads, then. Or even a normal racetrack, for that matter. You can read the full ID R first drive report on the Top Gear website.

Comments

now we just need a production version of this

This could end up being the new mustang joke as all the rich blokes who don’t have the driving expertise crash and probably die.

Sadly, I think that’s about as likely as me beating Lewis Hamilton to next year’s F1 title.

“I’m just off to the shops, I’ll be back in a bit”

Yeah you need the G-Suit to survive in that car!

A suit like this would be completely useless in a car like that. Fighter pilots generally experience most of the time positive Gs (the ones that push you into your seat, where your blood gets drawn to your legs and away of the head) and negative Gs from time to time (the ones where it’s the opposite and where blood gets drawn to the head), while a car will make you experience horizontal Gs. A G-suit only helps for positive Gs, as it presses on your legs and abdomen to avoid getting blood to the legs and keep it in the higher parts of the body. Since horizontal Gs don’t pull blood away from the head to send it to the legs, it’s useless.

Ok, first off, thats impressive, and second, centrifugal force isn’t a thing. I think he meant centripetal force

While centrifugal force doesn’t really exist, the centripetal force isn’t the correct word either. As centripetal force is the force in circular motion that keeps an object on a circular path. So in the case of a car the frictional forces between the tyres and the ground.