The Record-Breaking Radical SR8LM
Filed under: Luxury Cars & Autos

Once upon a time, racers would drive their race cars to the track on public streets, lap them around the track, win a race or two, then drive them back home. Stricter regulations have put an end to that and driven a wedge between racing cars and street-legal cars, but Radical wants to bridge the gap. The British performance garage makes road cars that are as close to racing cars as anyone's ever made. They're extreme. They're ridiculously impractical. And they're unprecedentedly fast.
Their latest product is the SR8LM. It packs a 455hp engine made from two motorbike engines, and if it looks like a Le Mans Prototype racer, that's because it very nearly is. Radical drove one down from their factory in England to the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife in pursuit of a new record. They already held the record for street-legal cars around the benchmark racing circuit, but they wanted to set the bar even higher. And that's just what they did, with a blistering lap time of 6 minutes, 48 seconds. To put that into perspective, even the most extreme exotic supercars don't break below the seven-minute mark. Not by a long shot. The 360hp SR8 did it a few years ago, but the SR8LM proved even faster. Best of all, you can buy one yourself, and in some places at least, drive it home when you're done on the track.
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