Brit-built Japanese saloon shows its stuff at the hallowed track.
The Subaru WRX STI Type RA NBR Special has managed to set a new lap record at the 20.5km-long Nürburgring Nordschleife track in Germany, in an exercise designed to showcase the virtues of Subaru’s symmetrical all-wheel drive system. The special WRX STI managed to get round the ‘Ring in just 6-minutes 57.5-seconds, the fastest ever track time for a four-door saloon car.
To be fair, while the WRX STI in question started out life as the sort of all-paw performance saloon you could go out and buy at a local dealership, it was custom-built and worked over by the performance gurus at Prodrive, a specialist British tuning company that relishes any challenge to make a car go faster. Its transformation into a “time attack car” began with the fitment of a full roll cage welded into the body, followed by modifications to the cars’ WRC-spec boxer engine (intake enlarged, turbo boosted to 250psi).
9-inch wide slicks sit on all four corners, helping the 448kW mill put its power down through a rally-spec gearbox with an automatic clutch, modified further with the help of hydraulics to fit paddle-shift operation. Cogs are swapped in as little as 20-milliseconds. Aerodynamics also played a role in this blistering lap time as well, with revisions carried out after the Type RA had a play at last years’ Isle of Man time trials to aid high-speed stability and handling. 295kg of downforce is generated at top-speed, and the setup includes a drag reduction system wing derived from Formula 1 technology.
Check out the video to see the WRX STI Type RA NBR Special when it first arrived to take on the Nürburgring. For more information on Subaru, check out our Showroom.
