Shots fired. Just a few months after Porsche set a new baseline for four-door performance cars at the Nurburgring, Alfa Romeo has returned to nab another Nurburgring record with the Giulia.
Alfa Romeo used a 505-horsepower Giulia Quadrifoglio equipped with an automatic transmission driven by test driver Fabio Francia to smash the old record. It’s a return to form for the carmaker; Alfa previously held the top sedan time after recording a time of seven minutes and 39 seconds in September 2015, but that was bested by the new Porsche Panamera Turbo in June, when Porsche clocked in a 7:38 lap. Now Alfa has reclaimed the title, demolishing Porsche’s lap time by a solid six seconds by setting a new record run of 7:32.
But if you think it was easy, think again. In a video of the record lap uploaded to YouTube by Motorsport.comIT, you can see just how hard Francia was pushing the Italian super sedan. In fact, about one minute and 50 seconds into the video, he appears to nearly completely lose control of the car at around 150 miles per hour, only to miraculously recover and continue on to set the mind-boggling time. And we can’t be entirely sure, but from what we can see, this Giulia doesn’t appear to have any sort of cage or any other specialized track safety equipment.
Take a second to digest all of this. This four-door Italian sedan drove around what is arguably the world’s most intense and unforgiving race track faster than the last-generation Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Is Alfa dabbling in dark magic here?
