The Lamborghini Huracan Performante is one of the brand’s fastest and most exciting vehicles to date. It’s lapped the Nurburgring Nordschleife faster than the Porsche 918 Spyder in a blistering 6 minutes and 52 seconds. But if you want to lap the Green Hell even faster, you’d better look to the Huracan Super Trofeo (especially after the tuning geniuses at ZYRUS have a crack at it). So what did it take to go four seconds faster than the road car?
As a start, the tuners took the Super Trofeo race car and improved just about everything. One of the most potent upgrades involved twin-turbocharging the engine to produce 1,200 horsepower (894 kilowatts). With the car weighing a meager 2,645 pounds (1,200 kilograms), it boasts the magic 1:1 power-to-weight ratio.
The onboard footage of the lap looks ridiculously quick basically everywhere. Even in slower sections of the circuit, the car looks like it does exactly what you want. As you’d normally expect with these types of vehicles, it isn’t just an overpowered collection of numbers that tries to kill you at every opportunity. We’d venture to guess that the balance of mechanical grip from the slick Pirelli tires and roughly 2,645 lbs (1,200 kg) of downforce at full speed give the Lambo relatively stable handling characteristics.
At the helm for the lap is Fredrik Sørlie, a precision stunt driver who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty at the race track. As a measure of his fearlessness, the lap was completed on an open track day, meaning he didn’t have the Green Hell all to himself. Being the racing driver he is, Sørlie mentioned that without slower traffic, he could have gone a couple seconds quicker.
Two days later when the circuit was a bit quieter, the team had another go with disastrous consequences. While the majority of the second attempt looked spot on, one of the Pirelli tires decided to let go midway through the lap at Kesselchen while carrying 136 mph (220 kph) through the corner. A testament to Sørlie’s driving skill, he merely brushed the inside wall and saved the car from being a complete write-off.