VW's Record-Smashing Pikes Peak Car Looks Mind-Bendingly Fast
The fearsome Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has a new record holder: French Le Mans winner Romain Dumas, who did the deed aboard VW’s bonkers fast ID R. The time? Seven minutes, 57.148 seconds - some 16 seconds that the previous outright record set by Sébastien Loeb and the Peugeot 208 T16 in 2013.
But you won’t get a decent impression of the speed of Dumas and the ID R from VW’s own video from the event (below), which is all aerial shots, Hans Zimmer-style orchestral music and deep voiceovers. Nope, you want to look at road-side footage like the Twitter-posted video above. Doesn’t it look astonishingly fast?
The purpose-built race car is powered by a pair of electric motors, giving an output of 671bhp and 470lb ft of torque. Plenty in a car that weights around a tonne. 0-62mph is predictably brisk: it’ll do it in under 2.25 seconds.
Now we know the ID R can last for at least eight minutes at full chat and going uphill, we can’t help but wonder how fast it might go around the Nurburgring. Well, VW hasn’t announced any future plans for the thing, so why not?
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
People 30 Years Ago: “I guess we will have flying cars in the future.”
VW: “Naaaaaaaahh! We can turn faster on the ground.”
Friendly reminder that our current F1 cars can corner at 8 Gs
Only a couple words for it:
HOLY CRAP!
What’s next, Nürburgring?
Could this bring VW into Le Mans?
Maybe
But let’s hope so
electric cars wont work at le mans
Woosh
Porsche: breaks the Nürburgring record
VW: ay hello
Get Chris von Koenigsegg on it right now.
VW owns Porsche, so…
If you listen carefully, you can hear Koenigsegg designing their own pikes peak record car
That is scary to think of, but also amazing lmao
That means seb will come back. He said I’ll be back when someone beats my time
I smell a Nurburgring record break attempt.😤