Diesel SEAT Arosa Dragster Humiliates New BMW M5

European drag race cars are a little weirder than their American counterparts. Instead of Mustangs or Camaros with giant V8s, you get front-wheel drive hatchbacks with diesel engines.

We've seen plenty of Skoda Fabias and SEAT Ibizas with the 1.9 TDI. But to be honest, we forgot that SEAT even built the Arosa. As a quick history lesson, this was their city car between 1997 and 2004. It's about the size of a Fiat 500, and as far as we know, it never came with a 2-liter diesel engine.

The Arosa is as extreme as these FWD dragsters get, fitted with much wider tires at the front, a big engine, a truck-sized turbocharger and even nitrous. Going fast is its only purpose in life. A company called Darkside pushed the old hatchback to 550 horsepower and 650 lb-ft (881 Nm) of torque.

However, it's only front-wheel-drive with a manual gearbox, while the BMW M5 is supposed to be a traction monster with 600 HP. This just goes to show that if you strip enough weight and from a hatchback and fit drag radials, it will eventually overcome its disadvantages.

On a real drag strip, the Arosa will do the quarter mile in under 10 seconds, so very few production cars can keep up with it. However, the loose surface of this runway creates real traction problems for it.

A drag race like this is entirely irrelevant. A car with no seats and a chimney stack coming out of the hood is not road-legal. But the M5 takes itself so seriously that being taken down a notch or two becomes satisfying to watch.