Toyota has set a new electric car record at the Nurburgring – with a silent but speedy 7min 47.794sec lap of the Nordschleife. You can watch the record lap in our video above.
Ring specialist Jochen Krumbach was at the wheel of the Toyota Motorsport EV P001 racer, obliterating Peugeot’s previous 9min 1.338sec record in the EX1 concept car. The electric car was powered by two e-motors from Brit specialist Evo Electric based in Woking. With 590lb ft of thrust on tap, the EV has a top speed of 161mph – which you can see on the faster sections of the lap in our film above.
Toyota Motorsport’s technical director Pascal Vasselon said: ‘The goals for this project were twofold: obviously we wanted to set a new EV lap record and I am very pleased we could achieve that so comprehensively. On the other hand, we also wanted to learn more about the operation of our electric powertrain in extreme circumstances; in motorsport there is no more extreme circuit than the Nurburgring.
‘On the record lap the TMG EV P001 performed better than in testing due to the improvement we already could make based on that experience. We have enhanced our electric powertrain development thanks to the information our engineers have gained and our future EV products will benefit from this project.’