It’s that time of the year when Car & Driver runs their famous Lightning Lap, and this year’s competition shaped up to be quite the good one, with 16 of the year’s most memorable vehicles vying for the top spot.
The vehicles contending for the crown, in order of lowest to highest price, were the Hyundai Elantra N, Subaru WRX, Hyundai Kona N, VW Golf GTI, Honda Civic Type R, Toyota GR Corolla Morizo Edition, BMW M240i xDrive, Toyota GR Supra 3.0, Audi RS3, BMW i4 M50, Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing, Chevrolet Corvette Z06, BMW M4 CSL, Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS, Mercedes-AMG SL63, and Lamborghini Huracan Tecnica.
Read More: These Are The Fastest Vehicles In Car And Driver’s 2022 Lightning Lap Competition
The way the Lightning Lap works is as follows: the magazine takes some of the year’s hottest cars around Virginia International Raceway (VIR), and ranks their lap times. Touted as the ultimate performance car test, Car & Driver has been putting on the Lightning Lap since 2006, and specifically goes to VIR because they believe it has all the features necessary for a well-rounded measure of a car’s performance.
The competition is also divided into five classes based on price: LL1 from $0 to $39,999, LL2 from $40,000 to $79,999, LL3 from $75,000 to $139,000, LL4 from $140,000 to $279,999, and LL5 from $280,000 and up. In terms of overall performance, the faster cars tended to be from the higher classes, but there were a few exceptions.
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The most notable one is the overall winner of Lightning Lap 2023: the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 with a time of 2:38.6. Sitting squarely in the LL3 class, it wasn’t even the top dog in terms of price, beating out all four cars in the LL4 class in addition to all those below. This might not surprise most people, especially given its specs on paper, but seeing the car actually live up to its “supercar killer” reputation is always nice.
The Audi RS3 in LL2 also impressed with a time of 2:52.5. Coming in 5th overall, only 4 of the other 15 cars were able to best it, and all four of them cost nearly twice as much, if not more. In order from slowest to fastest, those cars were the BMW M4 CSL, Lamborghini Huracan Tecnica, Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS, and of course, the mighty Corvette Z06.