Lotus Emira, McLaren 570S, Audi R8, Lamborghini Huracan, and Audi A3 ran a 1/4-mile drag race – dare you to guess the winner

When it comes to fast cars, nothing quite beats a 1/4-mile drag race. But in a quarter-mile sprint, could the standard street car Audi A3 hold its own against some of the quickest racetrack stalwarts?

The Audi A3 is classified as more of a family car nowadays, collecting kids on the school run or piling the camping gear into the boot for a weekend in the forest.

Compared to a Lotus Emira, McLaren 570S, Audi R8, and Lamborghini Huracan, the A3 is a distant memory for the racetrack.

Or is it?

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Lotus Emira, McLaren 570S, Audi R8, Lamborghini Huracan, and Audi A3 ran a 1/4-mile drag race

YouTube group Officially Gassed has put many supercars through their paces, but in their latest upload, the Audi A3 has drawn a straw to face cars far beyond its max speeds.

The group bought a scrapyard A3 for just $1,900 but poured in a further $17,500 of upgrades, including a Vara Technik forged engine and Turbo Kit. 

Still, they matched it up against unmodified cars such as the Lotus Emira ($75,000), whose slogan is ‘built for the track, engineered for every day.’

The McLaren 570S clocked in at $94,330, the R8 cost $81,000, and the Huracan blew away the rest of the competition at $327,000.

Surely, the A3 doesn’t stand a chance in this race – maybe if it was laps of a multistorey shopping center, but not in a straight quarter-mile drag race, right?

Wrong.

This scrapyard A3 just beat a McLaren 570S in a drag race

In a straight-line quarter-mile sprint, the Audi A3 smashed all of the supercars off the line but was pipped to the post by the R8 and Huracan, as the Audi lagged just a mere car length behind the Lambo.

As for the McLaren, well, in the famous words of Bart Simpson, the Audi said: ‘Eat my dust, suckers’.

In a re-run, the A3 continued to finish third, with the R8 and Huracan swapping positions, and the McLaren 570S still didn’t get out of bed. 

As for the Lotus, the A3 smashed it in a rolling start race, which ruled it out of the quarter-mile dart as the track only had space for three challengers to this jacked-up family runabout.

Maybe there is some blame to shift, too, as the mighty Vin Diesel taught us that it’s not about the car; it’s about the person behind the wheel.

Still, this A3 clearly isn’t everything that it is being forced into being on the parking lots, and it still holds its own on the track against the quickest cars of 2024.

Check out the full video here: