Warning: The following contains spoilers for the upcoming season premiere of Top Gear, so if you don’t wish to know, steer clear!
As you may or may not already know, the season premiere of Top Gear (now in its 19th season of the current format) debuted last night in the U.K. The episode won’t even air on BBC America until February 4, but Autoblog is reporting that videos of the season opener have already popped up on YouTube. Of course industrious (impatient?) fans have no doubt already turned the internet’s seedy underbelly and downloaded the episode for themselves.
Nevertheless, while we’re excited for another season of onscreen (and sometimes off-screen) antics from Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, what truly piqued our interest was the fact that the Pagani Huayra , piloted by none other than the ultimate mystery racer himself, The Stig, reportedly posted a new Top Gear Test Track Record. The car he did it in? The gratuitous piece of Italian motor porn itself, the $1.3m, 720 horsepower, and 230 mph flying Pagani Huayra. The new record: A blistering fast 1:13.8. The car it beat? The road legal, high-performance British sports car known as the Ariel Atom 500, a 3.0-liter, 500 horsepower V8 with carbon fiber body and, according to Ariel, capable of sprinting from 0-60 mph in less than 2.3 seconds. What’s even more impressive, however, is the fact that the Huayra managed to beat out the Atom’s recorded time by a full 1.3 seconds.
But don’t take our word for it, check out the video below and head over to YouTube in order to witness the Huayra’s dominance of the Top Gear Test Track.