Sports Auto Sets Hockenheimring Lap Record With A Lotus 3-Eleven
They say that lap times are meant to be broken and the only surprise is what car breaks them. German auto magazine Sport Auto also knows a thing or two about setting fast lap times, having used the Hockenheim race track as its personal proving ground for some of the fastest production cars it has tested. Recently, Sport Auto took a Lotus 3-Eleven, considered as the fastest series production model from to come out of Lotus, to Hockenheim for a series of hot laps, not knowing that it would end up setting a lap record around the Hockenheimring short circuit with a blistering time of 1.06:2.
If that isn’t impressive enough, the 460-horsepower 3-Eleven managed to knock off the Porsche 918 Spyder (1.06:3), the Gumpert Apollo (1.07:2), and the Radical SR3 SL (1.08:1) from their respective places in the top 3. Those are three legitimate supercars and one of them (the 918 Spyder) has even been billed as a hypercar.
Sport Auto road test editor Christian Gebhardt took the wheel of the 3-Eleven and set the record lap time despite having to use standard road tires for the lap. Oh, and temperatures around the track didn’t push past eight degrees Celsius (46.4 degrees Fahrenheit), which meant that he set that record lap time in sub-optimal weather conditions.
But none of these ready-made excuses ended up slowing down the Lotus 3-Eleven, which now sits comfortably in the magazine’s lap-time chart around the Hockenheimring short circuit. It remains to be seen how long the track-spec racer holds that record, but for as long as it lasts, the 3-Eleven can lay claim to being the fastest around the German circuit against some of the fastest supercars in the world today.
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