McLaren 720S Driver Beats Afroduck's Record Lap of NYC
AfroDuck’s record has fallen. A video posted to YouTube with little fanfare in late July shows the driver of a McLaren 720S completing a lap of NYC in 21 minutes, 3.16 seconds — beating the 24:07 record that launched AfroDuck to infamy, made him a fugitive, and forced him into exile in Canada.
The latest video, brought to Jalopnik’s attention by Fred Smith over at Road & Track, purports to show the unnamed driver of a white McLaren 720S completing a 24.5-mile lap of Manhattan on June 29, 2020, at 2:36 AM. The driver claims to have gotten stopped by 24 out of a possible 58 red lights along the route, and a photo of the McLaren’s dashboard from the end of the run shows the car, with just over 1,200 miles on the odometer, recorded an average speed of 69 mph and average fuel consumption of 5.9 mpg during the 21-minute run. (For reference, the same route takes roughly 42 minutes if you’re obeying traffic laws.)
The timing of the McLaren run is notable, as is the way the video was released. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, New York City went into lockdown on March 23, 2020. The city was still largely shut down when the McLaren driver recorded this lap, in the early hours of a Monday morning. Apparently, the driver hoped to avoid AfroDuck’s fate by keeping this record run secret for nearly 2 years: The video was only uploaded to YouTube on July 21, 2022, nearly 25 months after the run allegedly took place.
Here’s the 4x-sped-up account of the McLaren’s lap of Manhattan; we’ve also included the real-speed in-car video at the bottom of this article.
Fastest Lap Around Manhattan 2020 by @JTTHORNTON
Challengers of illegal public-road speed records had a field day in the COVID lockdown era. Cross-country Cannonball records were set and broken with astounding frequency throughout the lockdown era as daredevils took advantage of empty roads and the fact that police and emergency crews were busy handling a global pandemic that killed more than one million people in the U.S. alone. It’s a miracle that, as far as anyone is aware, nobody was killed or injured in any of these selfish record-setting attempts for which there’s no prize, no governing body, and dwindling glory.
G/O Media may get a commission
Consider what happened to AfroDuck. He set his 24-minute lap on August 26, 2013, driving a stock 2006 BMW Z4. AfroDuck’s video landed on the internet just 3 days later, and when Jalopnik first spoke with AfroDuck — real name Adam Tang — in the days after his lap, he was certain he would never get caught.
That optimism proved to be naive. By September 4th, then-NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly had put a target on AfroDuck’s back. Just one day later, 30-year-old Tang was taken into NYPD custody.
Fastest Lap Around Manhattan 2020 (FULL-LENGTH VERSION) by @JTTHORNTON
