The 'Ring Record Has Fallen To The Mighty 1000bhp McLaren P1 LM

Brace yourself: the Nurburgring production car lap record has fallen again, and just like with Volvo’s revelation yesterday, it’s a record that was broken ages ago that we weren’t told about.

This time it’s McLaren coming up with the goods, the ultra-extreme but road-legal P1 LM beating the Chinese Nio EP9 electric hypercar’s 6m45s time by just two seconds. The company says the 6m43.2sec time was recorded in the latter stages of the car’s development, with former racer and Indy 500 winner Kenny Brack at the wheel.

The LM project was run by Lanzante, the outfit that took a semi-works McLaren F1 GTR to victory in the 1995 Le Mans 24-Hours. While the five P1 LM production cars were built, a prototype named XP1LM was repeatedly testing both on the road and on track to make sure it was as all-round capable as Lanzante wanted it to be. Apparently, after the XP1LM set the record time, it simply drove all the way back home to England.

All six have a 194cc boost to 3994cc. With additional boost pressure, power is up to 1000bhp and 774lb ft of torque. That’s 1050Nm, in foreign. Big, big numbers whichever way you slice it. The P1 LM revs to 8500rpm, uses readily-available super-unleaded (the full 1000bhp needs 99-octane like Shell VPower Nitro+) and is electronically limited to 214mph.

The 1390kg car is about 345kg lighter than the electric EP9, but has 341bhp less to play with. The rarest and last of the P1 family is even 60kg lighter than the P1 GTR thanks to the removal of the air-jack system, the switch to lightweight seats designed to mimic those of the F1 GTR, an Inconel exhaust and titanium tail pipes. The windows are an advanced polycarbonate and most of the bolts and fixings are lightweight titanium.

But that’s only half the story. A modified rear wing, larger front splitter and dive planes create a massive 40 per cent increase in downforce versus the P1 GTR, a car already known for its impressive aero.

Inside the car there are swathes of exposed carbonfibre surfaces across the dashboard, instrument cowl, seat backs and more. There’s orange Alcantara detailing on the seat inserts and door pulls on the orange P1 Lms; black on the grey ones. The Alcantara on the steering wheel is unique to the LM version and is derived from the same stuff fitted to Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 championship-winning MP4/23. All five P1 LMs are sold (and probably were long ago) and will separate off to buyers in the USA, United Arab Emirates, Japan and the UK.