A modified Tesla Model 3 Performance barely missed the time of the legendary McLaren F1 sports car on a race track in Japan. The owner of the Model 3 explains how the car was made faster and how the race day went on the Tsukuba Circuit in a video on his YouTube channel DÆrik.
Before the race day at the end of January, the electric car was being processed by the tuning company “Unplugged Performance” from Hawthorne in California. Unplugged Performance specializes in Tesla cars and is located right next to a building owned by SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The modification kit “Tesla Model 3 Ascension R”, with which the mechanics from Unplugged Perfomance converted the silver Model 3, includes a rear spoiler, a new suspension, carbon ceramic brake discs and a stabilizer – a spring rod in the chassis, which reduces the so-called roll angle when cornering.
Erik Streit had brought his hot model 3 to Japan for the tuning fair “Tokyo Auto Salon 2020”, which took place from 10th to 12th January in Chiba, about 40 minutes’ drive from downtown Tokyo – and just over an hour from the Tsukuba Circuit. Straits Tesla has a street approval despite the massive tuning. But then he had him brought to the Tsubaka Circuit in a car transporter, as the video shows.
The conditions at the racetrack in Shimotsuma, a neighboring town of Tsubaka, were not optimal on January 22: the charging station had failed, so the Tesla had to charge a few kilometers away. It had rained and was cold. On top of that, the Japanese driver named Ken Negoro, whom Unplugged Performance had hired, was not a professional racing driver and had never driven a Tesla before, the video says. He therefore had to be shown how to switch on the racing mode “Track Mode” in Model 3.
Nevertheless, Negoro did a remarkable job with the Model 3. With a lap time of 1 minute, 4 seconds and 7 tenths of a second, he missed the fastest Tsubaka time of the legendary McLaren F1 by just a tenth of a second. The F1 is a super sports car with a 12-cylinder 6.1 liter engine from BMW with 627 to 680 hp. It was only built 106 times between 1993 and 1997. The price at that time was around 770,000 euros.
And here the circle closes in a way: In 1999, after selling its first company Zip2 (a manufacturer of navigation software) to the computer company Compaq for $ 305 million, none other than today’s Tesla CEO Elon paid off Musk with a McLaren F1 – and destroyed him in an accident on one of the first trips and without taking out insurance. But with the Model 3, Tesla has meanwhile created an affordable production car that delivers almost the same performance as one of the fastest sports cars of the 1990s at a fraction of the price.
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