If you had to guess, not having seen the headline above, what do you think would be the fastest four-door sedan to have ever lapped the Nürburgring Nordschleife?
A BMW M5, perhaps? Or a Mercedes-AMG E63? Maybe an Aston Martin Rapide or Porsche Panamera, if you’re liberal with the definition of a sedan? Those would all be good guesses, but as it turns out, they’d be wrong.
As Volvo’s motorsport partner Cyan Racing reveals in the video below, it actually set the lap record at the Nordschleife last year in an S60 Polestar last year already. But being Swedish (and not from Koenigsegg), they didn’t see the point in bragging about it at the time. Now that the big race weekend is approaching, though, it has spilled the beans.
The Swedes say they weren’t pursuing any such record, but in the process of testing, it set a lap time of 7:51.110 – which, as it turns out, is the fastest any four-door sedan had ever been clocked around the Green Hell. Now we don’t have any official, third-party confirmation for this, and we don’t know if it was a full lap or just bridge-to-gantry. Nor do we know if the vehicle was at all modified. It should also be noted that the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio has since set a faster lap time of 7:32. The new Honda Civic Type R (a five-door hatchback) also set a faster time at 7:43.8. If Volvo came back and set the same time with the mechanically identical V60 Polestar, though, it’d steal the wagon lap record away from the Seat Leon Cupra ST.
Any way you look at it, though, the time is pretty darn impressive when you consider that the S60 Polestar “only” boasts 362 horsepower from a four-cylinder engine – not upwards of 500 from a V6 like the Alfa (or some of the others mentioned above). Hear it straight from the proverbial lion’s mouth in the just-released video below.