The race for record honours at Germany's famously treacherous and challenging Nürburgring Nordschleife is serious business. The world's manufacturers now like to use it as an empirical measure of absolute performance.
This is both a gift and a curse for the car-buying public, as James May once mused, because it ensures that many of these cars — with their race-track set-up generated for track-day performance — become horrendous cars to use on daily roads.
Honda tend to be a fine example of this. For quite some time everything that's worn a Type R badge from their showroom has been as stiff and crashy to drive in as a baby stroller filled with lead.
And this isn't about to stop, with the company now taking back its record for the world's fastest front-wheel drive car around the green hell — having set a blistering lap time of 7min 43.8sec. Seven seconds quicker than the outgoing generation Type R, and pipping the former record-holding Volkswagen Golf GTi Clubsport S's time by three seconds.
It's worth considering that, like their last record, this one was claimed by Honda with the aid of a floating roll cage. The addition of that cage meant that the rear seats had to be removed, which Honda claim doesn't provide them with any advantage.
Regardless, this new Type R is an insanely quick machine. We can't wait to get our mits on one...