It’s here: the fastest-ever Range Rover

As Land Rover has mentioned a few times recently, it has spent the last several months working on a range-topping, really-bloody fast version of the Range Rover Sport. This is it. It’s called the Range Rover SVR, and it’s the fastest production Land Rover… in the world.

How fast? 542bhp, 502lb ft and 162mph fast, that’s how. And such is the fashion these days, LR has thrown this two-tonne megabomb around the Nürburgring, thus giving James May a mild aneurism.

This SVR pumped around the Green Hell in eight minutes and 14 seconds, making it faster than – if you believe in such fairytale times at the ‘Ring – the Lexus IS-F, original Honda NSX and as quick as a Merc C63 AMG.

Underneath sits Jaguar’s lovely 5.0-litre all-aluminium supercharged V8 pinched from the F-Type R, offering up 40bhp more than the previous range-topping RRS V8. Then there’s uprated suspension and firmer bushings, and recalibrated torque vectoring.

All that power reaches all four wheels through a ZF eight-speed automatic gearbox with shift times reduced by a whopping 50 per cent (and throttle blipping on downshifts). Noise comes courtesy of a two-stage active exhaust, to give a ‘racecar-inspired’ soundtrack at higher revs without, we’re told, compromising refinement.

Elsewhere you’ll notice the new front bumper, a new aluminium wing panel, lots of SVR badging, a spoiler, quad exhaust pipes and 22in alloy wheels. Brakes come courtesy of Brembo with six-pistons, and you can choose from six colours, including the Estoril Blue in the pictures.

How much for such ‘Ring honed SUV fastness, you cry? A full £93,450. Which is a £12,000 premium on the ‘standard’ V8 Range Rover Sport, and, we think, a sensible time to ask whether two-tonne SUVs should really be concerning themselves with laps of the Nürburgring.

Source: www.topgear.com