Current TT champ John McGuinness is the fastest man on a bike round the Isle, but could a car beat him? And if so, which model would it have to be?
I spent a couple of days on the Isle of Man recently, filming another one of our Pure Driving Experience vids with Dunlop.
I took a Mercedes-Benz A45 AMG, and more by luck than judgement we managed to persuade the powers that be on the island to close the fearsome mountain section of the TT course so that we could film on it to our hearts’ content.
Which meant that I could drive the A45 pretty much as fast as I could, all day long, across one of the fastest, most dangerous sections of the world’s fastest, most dangerous road racing course. So it was quite a day out, and has hopefully produced quite a good vid.
But on the journey home, and during the days that followed, I kept on wondering – might it be possible to drive a car faster than a motorbike around the 37.73 mile TT course?
You couldn’t do it in a road car, of course, because as it stands the outright lap record is a frankly astonishing 17min 11.572sec, held by current TT champion John McGuinness. He did the time on a full house Honda CBR 1000 RR earlier this year, and it meant that he lapped the course at average speed of, deep breath, 131.671mph. Which is, of course, totally insane and is way beyond the capabilities of anything four wheeled that wears a set of number plates.
The current unofficial road car lap record, for example, is held by ex-rally driver Mark Higgins, who drove a “lightly modified”