2022 Audi RS3 claims best Nürburgring lap among compact cars

Nürburgring lap times: either you keep them as a reference for performance comparisons – a way to find out who is really fastest – or you don’t really care. But automakers care a lot about them because they are easy enough to navigate to get instant performance credibility. And Audi has just set the record for the best lap time in a compact car with the 2022 RS3.

The weather? 7: 40: 748. Enough to beat the previous category record around the Green Hell, held by the Renault Mégane RS Trophy-R, of 4.64 seconds. The tour of the RS3 was recorded in June, in a camouflaged sedan driven by the development of Audi Sport pilot Frank Stippler.

The RS3 in question is said to have been fitted with the same semi-slick Pirelli Trofeo-R rubber that customers can choose from the dealership. Tire pressure was adjusted for the Nürb, and a roll cage and proper racing seats were fitted to keep Stippler safe and firmly planted while he did all the hard work.

Some Nürburgring experts, like Dale Lomas of BridgeToGantry, denounce such modifications because they take the car in question outside the domain of what is considered a stock and arguably, the result is not appropriate for a classification of production cars.

FHostage of the effort of the Mégane proves that the hatch did not have a roll bar like the RS3. As for the seats, it’s hard to say. Comparing lap times at the Nürburgring is also more difficult than it should be these days, not least because the nature of what constitutes a lap of the famous circuit changed two years ago.

It was at this point that the track organizers themselves began to certify their own “official” 12.9 mile Nordschleife lap, doing away with the old gantry bridge system that reduced the overall distance. of about 250 meters from now. As a result, the times recorded since 2019 are incomparable with those recorded before 2019, unless the automaker has gone out of its way to release both laps like Mercedes-Benz did last November for the AMG GT Black Series.

The Ring’s official tour criteria were meant to remove some of the variability that manufacturers had exploited in trying to set records. Obviously, it’s not as strict as this could be, given the differences between the equipment equipping the two cars alone the classification of the compact class.

Comparing the RS3 and the Mégane on paper, it’s hard to imagine that Audi wouldn’t have taken the lead despite some of these changes. The new RS3 has a torque-vectoring all-wheel drive system and 394 horsepower in Euro trim, or 401 horsepower for North American models. The Renault hatch was a front-wheel drive car with about 100 horsepower less, although it also probably weighed a lot less than the RS3, at 2,879 pounds. We don’t have those numbers on the new RS3, but the outgoing sedan tipped the scales at 3,593 pounds.

Both cars are closing in on the 7: 38: 925 lap recorded by the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S in June, which leads the SUV category. The current record holder among all production cars is the 991 generation Porsche 911 GT2 RS (equipped Manthey Racing parts), who clocked 6: 43.300 – almost exactly a minute faster than the new compact leader.