Minimum lap-time planning (MLTP) is a well-established problem in the race car industry to provide guidelines for drivers and optimize the vehicle’s setup. To effectively handle the resulting complexity, we devised an efficient direct dynamics computational method based on Featherstone’s articulated-body algorithm (ABA). To solve the MLTP, we employed a direct-collocation technique, discretizing the problem so that all information of the 3D track is pre-processed and directly embedded into the discrete problem.