McLaren 720S GT3X: how fast did it lap Dunsfold?

Read the review on this already? If not, I’d suggest you steer yourself this way. However, you’re not going to, because you’ve seen the headline and want to know just how fast the GT3X went around Dunsfold.

Better not keep you waiting then: 1min 07.2secs.

Which is tremendously fast, but needs to be caveated. It’s not a legitimate time because McLaren’s fastest track day toy is not road legal and would get stranded on a speed bump. So it won’t be going on the leaderboard.

That said, let’s unpick what Stig has done here. The fastest car on the leaderboard is the Ferrari SF90, which has almost 250bhp more but had to run on road-legal trackday tyres rather than the full slicks worn by the GT3X. It’s also about 400kg heavier. That did a 1min 11.3. Which is four whole seconds slower.

So we’d better look elsewhere for fast laps. A Ferrari FXX is cut from similar cloth – that did a 1min 10.7secs in the famous episode where His Whiteness was revealed to be none other than Michael Schumacher. That was in 2013. Even further back (2009) there was the Aston Martin DBR9, a full house Le Mans car. Result: 1min 08.6secs. In 2017 an FXX-K with 1,035bhp eventually came back and did a 1min 08.1secs.

In fact single seaters are the only things that have gone faster than the GT3X. The Lotus T125 achieving a 1min 03.8secs lap and Renault’s R24 F1 car, which managed to get round our 1.75-mile circuit in under a minute. On a damp, greasy track.

Of course the GT3X had already proved itself in a warm up, winning the shootout on the Goodwood Festival of Speed hill earlier this summer in a time of 45.01secs. But we all know what matters more, don’t we?