What's the news?
Skoda has confirmed that its hot Kodiaq RS has set a lap record of the Nurburgring Nordschleife, the famous, and famously lethal, 20.8km race track set into the Eiffel Mountains of north-west Germany. It's seen victories by the likes of Fangio, Moss, Lauda, and Hunt, and an all-time lap record set by the legendary Porsche 956 race car.
And now? Skoda has set a new lap record, in a class that we never knew had a Nurburgring lap record - seven seat family cars.
Yup, even with a diesel engine on board, Skoda managed to get a Kodiaq RS to lap the Nurburgring in 9 minutes 29.84 seconds - pretty respectable stuff. The new RS model, which goes on sale later this year, uses the same 240hp twin-turbo 2.0-litre TDI diesel engine that you'll find in the Volkswagen Tiguan BiTurbo. To help back up the power, it also gets adaptive chassis control, drive mode select, and progressive steering. Oh, and a cabin sound generator to make the engine sound more sporty from the inside, but we doubt that helped it to go any faster.
What, or more accurately who, did make it go faster was Sabine Schmitz. Familiar to Top Gear fans as an occasional presenter and the only person on the show to be faster than The Stig, Schmitz essentially lives and works at the Nurburgring, taking paying punters for wild rides in high performance cars as one of the drivers of the Ring Taxi service. The former winner of the Nurburgring 24hrs race reckons that she has done more than 30,000 laps of the fearsome circuit, so she probably knows fairly well which way it goes.
"The Skoda Kodiaq RS is great fun on the track," said Schmitz. "Skoda has made full use of its large SUV's potential with the Kodiaq RS. I can certainly imagine that I'll be encountering the Kodiaq RS regularly during my laps around the Nordschleife in future."
Skoda's first SUV RS model will get an official public showing at the Paris motor show in October, and will be on sale in Ireland in time for next year. Raymond Leddy, Head of Marketing at Skoda Ireland commented: "The RS model line-up has always proved very popular in Ireland. We are delighted to see this range extended beyond the Octavia and now into the Kodiaq. And what better way to introduce the model than with a World record lap of one of the World's most famous tracks. The Kodiaq RS equally embodies the versatility and spaciousness of a family SUV as well as emotiveness and dynamism. We cannot wait to see this amazing vehicle on Irish roads in 2019."
Watch the lap here:
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