Word has just come out that the 2012 Infiniti M35h Hybrid has established a new quarter-mile standing-start speed record for the genre at an event held last month at Britain’s Santa Pod Raceway. Driven by Tim Pollard, an associate editor at CAR Magazine, the unmodified Infiniti M35h averaged 13.901 seconds during a series of passes with the quickest being a 13.896 second clocking. Terminal speed in all of those trips down a rain-soaked track was in excess of 100 mph. The effort was duly witnessed and subsequently recognized as a new official elapsed-time mark by a representative of the Guinness World Records organization.
The idea to use the M35h to try for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records came from the Infiniti Europe communications department as a way to help support the UK launch of the division’s first hybrid offering. Hybrid or not, the M35h proved quick enough to put it in the company of some pretty impressive players. According to numbers supplied by Infiniti, its 360-hporsepower luxury sedan sprinted through the quarter mile as quickly as a 1982 Lamborghini Countach S and barely a tenth of a second slower than a 1998 BMW M3. It also was just three-tenths off the pace of a 2007 Aston Martin V8 Vantage Volante and Porsche 911 Carrera, and four-tenths in arrears to both the 1966 Shelby Cobra and 1964 Ferrari 250 GTO.
