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Volkswagen now holds the title of fastest front-drive production car around the Nurburgring following the release of the Golf GTI Clubsport S.
German racing driver, 28-year-old Benny Leuchter, steered the three-door manual-only two-seat Golf GTI Clubsport S around the 20.8km Nurburgring Nordschleife in seven minutes, 49.21 seconds.
The lightweight and powered-up limited edition model beat outgoing record holder the Honda Civic Type R by just eight-tenths, while soundly trumping 2014’s record holder the Renault Sport Megane Trophy-R by 5.15sec.
The lightest local GTI weighs 1313kg but lacks this model’s limited-slip differential, 19-inch alloy wheels with Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 rubber, “special” brake pads with aluminium brake covers and unique exhaust that “produces a wonderful and deliberate ‘backfire’ under braking”.
The coolest feature of all, however, is a special ‘Nurburgring’ mode hidden within the standard adaptive suspension settings.
The Nurburgring function is not merely a hard suspension setting, explains Volkswagen: “If a car is fine-tuned for driving on a normal racetrack, where the suspension is very stiff, this isn’t helpful on the Nordschleife. The car needs to be fairly soft vertically, but at the same time stiff when it comes to lateral damping.”
“This is exactly what the Volkswagen engineers managed to take into account when fine tuning the spring/damper package for the DCC (Dynamic Chassis Control) system,” the company adds.
Timed for release at the annual Volkswagen Festival held at Wörthersee, Austria, only 400 Golf GTI Clubsport S models will produced, with 100 reserved for the German market. Only a variation of the regular model is yet confirmed to arrive locally, in five-door automatic form in Australia named Golf GTI 40 Years.
