The world’s fastest diesel powered production car is a BMW 335d, recording a world speed record on the famous 13 kilometre Nardo Ring in Southern Italy.

In what looks decidedly like a stock standard BMW 335d, the car, built by the premier German tuning company AC Schnitzer and known as a the ACS3 3.5d Coupe, smashed through the previous record by 8.7 km/h to reach an official speed of 288.7 km/h.

Sponsored by tyre manufacturer Continental AG in conjunction with AUTO BILD sportscars, each year, the best of the German tuners engage in a high-performance shoot out to determine the world’s fastest cars.

AC Schnitzer is no stranger to world speed records, and this latest effort is the third such record in recent times for the prestigious BMW tuner.

In 2006 they scored a victory with the Tension as the fastest street legal BMW and then again in 2007 with their gas powered GP3.10, which still stands today.

CarAdvice recently road tested the 330d in Australia, and can testify to its stunning performance and ridiculously low fuel consumption.

Also worth a mention was the performance by another AC Schnitzer car, the ACS4 3.5 turbo, which is based on the BMW Z4 sdrive 35i roadster.

The Z4 reached a speed of 303.1 km/h and although this effort did not produce another world record, this was an unusually high speed for a roadster.

AC Schnitzer is represented in Australia, by RamSpeed at ramspeed.com.au