Xiaomi doing some clickbait saying it’s the fastest 4-door car… quite misleading. It’s a race car.
However, this is still a remarkable achievement. China stay winning
Holy fucking shit how is it gripping on some of those high speed corners it’s like this thing is on rails.
Slick tyres will do that lol. The difference between even the best road tyres and slicks is huge. Over a 90 second lap, slicks will give you a 3+ seconds advantage per lap versus even the best road legal tyres, and a 6+ second advantage over good tyres. On a track like the Nurburgring, you’re probably looking at around 15 seconds at least over the best road legal rubber.
While the handling through the high speed is very good, you can see the driver is having to hustle through the low speed quite a lot, the front is sliding leading to understeer. A lot of that is just inevitable given how heavy most electric cars are, but I’d say there’s definitely room for improvement in the road legal version, and I have no doubts that the engineers will use the data from this test to improve on it.
Surely they’re not running slicks in the wet? I can literally see water on the road in most of the corners on the track.
All the photos of the car on track and in the official marketing materials show it running on Pirelli slicks. The only really wet part was foxhole, which is why the driver lifted through there, in a car with this level of performance that entire section is usually taken flat out.
This prototype also has a diffuser and front splitter that would never pass a roadworthy test, which makes sense given the downforce numbers claimed at over 2000kg of downforce. The body is also full carbon fibre, the interior is stripped out and there’s a roll cage. It’s basically a full on race car. The road legal non prototype version is probably aiming for a lap time of around under 7:10, and hopefully aiming to break the production EV record of 7:05.
