Two minutes, twenty-five seconds. That’s how long it took factory Subaru racer Scott Speed to hustle the ridiculously fast WRX-based Airslayer around the Grand Course at Virginia International Raceway. The time was set during Car and Driver’s annual Lightning Lap event, this one the seventeenth such event in the magazine’s long history. But there’s more to the story than just one man going fast in one derestricted race car.
Mr. Speed, a name which he certainly earned during the course of this event, had put in a pretty quick lap on day one in the two-minute twenty-sixes, and had finished with magazine photography on day two. He was in his car heading away from the race track when he got a call letting him know that he had to come back and set another, faster, lap. The Le Mans Garage 56 NASCAR-based Chevrolet Camaro, in the hands of IMSA champion Jordan Taylor, had beat him!
There’s a special level of speed that comes with driving a car that spits flames. [I once had an 80-horsepower Porsche that would spit flames, but that was more to do with a poorly tuned fuel injection system than anything fast.] This Subaru’s hood-vented exhaust will shoot fire with the best of them. In the onboard video of Speed’s fast lap you can see the flames popping up, as if a demon from hell itself was urging him to go faster.
Because the Airslayer is based on a Vermont Sports Car Subaru WRX rallycross competition chassis, and was designed for Travis Pastrana to jump over a river, it can definitely handle hopping a few kerbs in the name of pace. Speed used his own rallycross experience to make the track just a little bit wider than the pavement, dipping into the grass at the apex and just a smidge at track out, working real hard for those extra hundredths of a second.
At the end of the day Scott Speed managed to set a time just over a second up on the NASCAR behemoth, running a 2:25.6 to Rodney Sandstorm’s 2:26.7. It’s impressive to think about, and even more impressive to watch. Click play and hear Speed talk about the lap himself.