How the Porsche 911 GT3 RS lapped the BIC in under 2 minutes
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We are standing on hallowed ground. A place where champions have raced and history has been made, and we are aiming to make history again. No road-going car in production spec has ever lapped under the 2-min mark and that’s what the target is. Welcome to the Buddh International Circuit, or BIC as we know it, the one and only circuit in India that has hosted rounds for both Formula 1 and MotoGP championships. This 5.125km track symbolises the pinnacle of motorsport and speed, and hence, setting a lap record here guarantees both man and machine the ultimate bragging rights.
But to set a lap record on India’s ultimate track you need the ultimate driver piloting the ultimate machine. Yes, India’s first Formula 1 driver Narain Karthikeyan is back, and this time he’s behind the wheel of what is touted today as the ultimate road-going track car in the world – the 992-gen Porsche 911 GT3 RS.
For Narain, the BIC is familiar territory. He’s the only Indian driver to have raced here in the Indian GP, not just once but twice (2011 and 2012), and he’s even more familiar with the job at hand. In fact, it’s with a ‘been there, done that’ feeling that Narain and all of us at Autocar India arrive at the BIC to meet the bright yellow 911 GT3 RS waiting in the pit garage.
The 911 GT3 RS is one of most ultimate track oriented cars in the world.
Narain has broken the production car lap record at the BIC not once but twice, both times in a Porsche and both times for Autocar India. The first time the F1 star set a new lap record was back in November 2018 in his personal Porsche 911 GT3. His lap time of 2m 07.629s was a good two seconds faster than the previous best of 2m 09.853s set by Christian Hohenadel, the 2010 FIA GT3 champion in a Mercedes-AMG GT R. To break the record in a regular GT3 and not the track-focused RS model was very impressive, and a testimony to Narain’s speed and the GT3’s pedigree. But let’s face it, this was a record waiting to be broken and the opportunity to do just that came a few months later with the ballistic 911 GT2 RS. Producing 700hp, the GT2 RS’ twin-turbo flat-six is a good 200hp more powerful than Narain’s naturally aspirated GT3 and it was a given that he would smash the GT3’s record, but by how much?
The previous lap record set by Narain himself in March 2019.
Conditions were not ideal on that warm March day and the high ambient temperatures had an impact on engine performance and also took its toll on the tyres, leaving a very small window for Narain to string together a hot lap. But he managed to shatter the lap record in his inimitable style. Using every one of the GT2 RS’s 700 horses, Narain blitzed around the BIC in 2m 00.266s – a good 7.5 seconds faster than his GT3’s time! This was a new lap record that wouldn’t be broken for a long time. But for how long? There was a nagging itch to set a sub-2min lap time and quite honestly, t...
