New car news

01 July 2010 - 11:00

Zonda R's 'Ring record on tape

Pagani's official report was short and brutally sweet. It read:

'On the infamous Nurburgring Nordschleife, in the early dawn, the Pagani Zonda R recorded a lap-time of 6:47 thanks to bespoke P-Zero tires developed by Pirelli.'

That's it. That is how Pagani announced its claim to have set a new Nurburgring lap record for a ‘road-based car', beating the Ferrari 599XX's 6m58 set back in April. No fanfare, no balloons, not even a cupcake with a candle on top.

And now it's released a video of the day, laying to rest the claims that it all wasn't quite kosher. Or has it?

This may be, in part, because Pagani's claim is fraught with difficulty. But before we dive headlong into those difficulties, a few facts about the R, the $2.1m, strictly-limited-to-15-cars final flourish for the Zonda.

Powered by a 6.0-litre V12, it develops 551kW and 710Nm of torque... and weighs just 1,070kg. That means a 0-100 time under three seconds and a top speed somewhere around 350km/h. That's a pretty potent recipe for Nurburgring destruction.

But it isn't road legal. Neither, Pagani will point out, is the 599XX, which went round the ’Ring 11 seconds slower than the Zonda R a couple of months ago, to much crowing from Ferrari. Nor is the Radical SR8 LM, which did it in 6min 48 last August. But ‘production-derived' covers a multitude of sins, doesn't it?

Part of the problem, of course, is that there's no official body that rules on Nurburgring records: no regulations on whether the timed lap should be from a standing or flying start, no rules on what defines a ‘road-based car'...

For now, let's leave it at this: wherever you stand on Nurburgring records, 6m47 is one monstrously quick lap... and this is a fantastic birds-eye view.

Still, we spotted a few fluffed gearchanges and missed apexes on the way around... is there a 6min 45sec in it, perhaps?

Sam Philip