Nürburgring lap record attempt also planned.
It’s a known fact that Tesla wants to steal a bit of the Porsche Taycan’s thunder by trying to set a record lap for the fastest four-door EV at the Nürburgring. It certainly won’t happen this week because the ongoing Industry Pool specifically forbids any attempts to set lap records, therefore we’ll have to wait a little bit more.
There's also the matter of preparing the car used for the attempt and getting it ready for a fast lap, with Elon Musk revealing on Twitter that Tesla has to “review & tune Model S thoroughly for safety on Nürburgring, especially Flugplatz session.”
Ok, but what does that have to do with the headline of this story? Well, the reply mentioned above was part of a tweet from Tesla’s head honcho in which he announced the Model S has set a new record for the fastest four-door car at Laguna Seca. Since he didn’t mention anything about the record-breaking lap time belonging strictly to four-door electric vehicles, we’re going to assume the Model S has established the outright record for cars with rear doors at the famous circuit in California.
The time to beat would have to be 1 minute and 37.54 seconds – a performance achieved last year by the Jaguar XE SV Project 8. The record before that belonged to the Cadillac CTS-V with a time of 1 minute and 38.52 seconds.
Elon Musk says a video will be released shortly when we’ll hopefully get to find out the lap time and also who was behind the wheel of the car. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Model S used for the record lap was completely stock in order to fully qualify for the title of the fastest production four-door car or it went through some changes to shave off a few seconds from the lap time. Presumably, the vehicle used was the hotter Performance variant.
We’ll update the story once the video is out.
