Tsukuba Circuit is a track that most motorsports enthusiasts know well thanks to its prominent inclusion in both the Forza Motorsports and Gran Turismo franchises. If you’ve lapped it virtually, you know it’s a relatively compact track that’s deceptively hard to drive well due to its combination of long, sweeping corners and tricky hairpins.
In other words, if you’ve got any familiarity with the course, you’d expect that a 2,640-pound carbon-kevlar-bodied C6 Corvette with a 427-cubic-inch, 1,300-horsepower V8 would be a handful on it. As it turns out, you’d be right!
In this video, Feras Qartoumy wrings a couple of test laps out of his World Time Attack-prepped C6 at Tsukuba Circuit, where he quickly discovers that the traction control is broken. For the first minute of the video before the tires are up to temp, you can tell that the tires are breaking away completely on straightaways in second gear. If that’s not enough evidence that this car is a lot to handle, Qartoumy has the C6 sideways out of virtually every corner.
Despite this, with the tires (slightly) warmed, he still sets a blazingly fast time for a shakedown. A quick check of the video runtime on his second lap shows a lap time of around 54 seconds. That’s roughly two seconds off the Tsukuba lap record for a Formula Three car, and the Corvette is still technically considered a production vehicle.
That tracks for the ‘Vette. When Qartoumy ran Global Time Attack at Circuit of the Americas, he turned a 2:03.850, roughly ten seconds quicker than a NASCAR cup car lap time. According to Qartoumy’s Instagram, he’s set records at 28 different tracks — no word if Tsukuba is next on his menu yet or not, but it seem that if he wants to break a record there, he’s got more than a fighting chance at it.
