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Tesla Model S Plaid Prototype Now Attacking the Nurburgring With Giant Rear Wing

Remember how Tesla descended onto the Nurburgring with a couple of Model S Plaid prototypes back in September? Well, one of the two cars unofficially destroyed the Porsche Taycan Turbo's lap time and thus created a snowball that is still rolling.
Tesla Model S Plaid 16 photos
Photo: S.Baldauf/SB-Medien
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A few days after that hand-timed 7:20 minute-run, Elon Musk casually tweeted that Tesla has just deployed its first-ever Supercharger station at the Nurburgring and that the Tesla Model S with the Plaid drivetrain can easily hit a 7:05 minute lap time with some modifications.

The first modifications likely included the humongous diffuser sported by the blue prototype our spy photographers snapped last week, but Tesla's Green Hell odyssey doesn't look like it has an immediate ending.

Today, we bring you the same blue prototype as last week, but this time its giant aerodynamic diffuser is paired with a ginormous rear wing and an almost equally large front lip. By the way, if you're wondering why Tesla seems to have poured all its testing resources into the blue car and left the other prototype alone it's because the red Model S was almost totaled on the same track just a few days ago.

The addition of so many aerodynamic aids after already achieving the feat of beating Porsche can only mean one thing: the Plaid drivetrain is simply too monstrously powerful for the car to safely attack the corners of the Nurburgring at the highest speed possible.

It's pretty unlikely, though, unless Tesla is now actively chasing the road-legal car record around the Nordschleife, currently being held by the Lamborghini Aventador LP-770-4 SVJ, with a 6:44.97 minutes lap time.

That would also mean that Tesla would have to build at least a limited number of road cars based on the prototype, and most of the modifications do look production-ready, save for maybe the giant wing.

That said, if Tesla would ever announce a one-make racing series we wouldn't be surprised if the cars would look pretty much like this Plaid prototype.
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About the author: Alex Oagana
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Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project.
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