► SCG 003S targets 6min30s
► Road car evolution of 24hr racer
► Nearly 30sec faster than Porsche 918
Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus says it believes its new SCG 003S road car, premiered at the 2017 Geneva motor show, will become the fastest road-legal car to lap the Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit.
The New York-based boutique racing car and, now, road car constructor expects the newly launched street-legal version of its 003 racing car to record a target lap time of 6min30s.
Click here for an in-depth tour of the SCG 003S
Six minutes 30 seconds sounds quite quick…
It’s a full 22 seconds faster than the Lamborghini Huracan Performante’s recent 6min52s lap video. Porsche’s 918 Spyder, the previous supercar benchmark, recorded a 6min57s lap, and Britain’s own Radical SR8 has lapped the circuit in 6min48s.
The all-time Nordschleife record stands at 6min11s, set by German racing driver Stefan Bellof in a Group C Porsche 956 racing car in 1983, albeit on a different circuit layout to that of today.
How can SCG be so confident?
It’s all down to cold, hard data recorded in its exploits racing at the Nurburgring in the VLN series in the SCG 003C, the original racing version of the new SCG 003S.
‘That car in the VLN did a 6m20s lap. Every GT3 car does it. That’s physics,’ SCG founder Jim Glickenhaus told CAR.
‘You quickly learn that if you develop a car for the Nordschleife, it is quick everywhere,’ the SCG 003’s chief engineer Paolo Garella told us. ‘There has never been a car that has been so specifically designed for that race [the Nurburgring 24 Hours].’
Tyres: the crucial ingredient in a Nordschleife record
‘Tyres are the main factor in a Nurburgring lap,’ Jim Glickenhaus told CAR. ‘It’s aerodynamics, it’s design – but mainly, it’s tyres – end of discussion. A road car tyre will not do a full lap of the Nordschleife. If you look at [the video of] the Porsche 918 lap, at the end of it he’s missing apexes; it’s not because he’s a bad driver, it’s because the tyres are gone.
‘Our car is 900kg of net downforce, 2g on road tyres, 2.5g on race slicks. The point is, you tell me what’s going to happen to the tyres during the lap – they’re going to go off.’
‘Mercedes, they’re targeting the same time as us, 6min30s [with the new AMG hypercar], and they’ll do it, and we’ll do it – depending on tyres.’
Glickenhaus says he would support an independently run event to record laptimes for road-legal cars at the Nurburgring.
‘What I want to do is this. Here are the rules: a real person has to own the car, not a company. The tyres have to be tyres that you can buy at the tyre store – anyone can buy them. Drive the car from Cologne on the road to the Nordschleife. You cannot change ride heights, any settings. After the top 30 [qualifying for the 24 Hours race] I want them to give us five slots – there could be a McLaren P1, La Ferrari, for example, and we’ll be there – and we’ll find out what a real road car, on real tyres, can do on the Nordschleife. And that’s it. That ends the crap.’
Watch a driver’s eye view of the SCG 003C racing car in action on the Nordschleife below: