Nissan ‘Qashqai-R’ breaks fastest SUV record

Severn Valley Motorsport in the UK has turned a Nissan Qashqai and the running gear from a Nissan GT-R into a blisteringly fast SUV.

Okay, so it’s not quite an actual Qashqai, in fact it’s not even all SUV. But it is all Nissan.

SVM took the Qashqai’s body off its chassis, and dropped it onto the chassis and running gear of a Nissan R35 GT-R… and then gave it more than 1490kW.

The GT-R’s engine had been with SVM since 2012, and has incrementally made its way up from being worth a meagre 633kW when they first played with it.

The 3.8-litre twin-turbo V6 (or VR38DETT, as Nissan calls it).

So, how fast is a 2000bhp Nissan Qashqai?

If you do what Severn Valley Motorsport did, it’ll hit 382km/h.

That’s a whole 12km/h faster than the speed set by Toyota’s own 1490kW Landcruiser, which has a 5.7-litre V8 with “volleyball-sized” turbos capable of 55psi.

Impressively, the Qashqai-R, as SVM calls it, also beat plenty of others at the speed run event they took it to.

The timing board shows the likes of a Koenigsegg Agera RS, a Koenigsegg One:1, a Lamborghini Huracán, and a BMW M6 built by Wrench Studios, all underneath the Qashqai-R. Though we did see that the Agera later topped the Qashqai’s time by about 7km/h.

If you haven’t already, you need to watch the video. It had staff here at the MOTOR office standing around laughing as we watched an SUV pass a GT-R over a quarter mile… after giving it a head start.