Numbers help us make sense of the world. In cars, numbers tell us a lot—a car that does 0-60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds is objectively quicker than one that does it in 3.6 seconds.
In the age of the car magazine, a car’s most important numbers were its 0-60 mph time and its top speed. But those only paint a small picture of what a car can do. Add in skid-pad and braking tests, and the picture looks more complete, but it’s hardly done.
The Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time, however, gives a more comprehensive look. A test at the most demanding race circuit on the planet, something that asks a lot of a car, but spits out something quantifiable. The Nürburging lap time has turned into a bit of an obsession for automakers and enthusiasts alike. But it is a frustratingly unscientific measure.
Welcome to The Rabbit Hole, a bi-weekly column where Senior Editor Chris Perkins explores his latest obsession with automotive technology. He speaks to the best in the business to understand how cars work and what the future of the automobile looks like.
The 12.9-mile-long circuit in the Eifel Mountains has existed for nearly 100 years, but it being a benchmark for production-car lap times is a more recent phenomenon. Japanese TV program Best MOTORing started running time attacks there as early as 1989; Nissan proudly announced in 1995 that its R33 Skyline GT-R was the first road car to go sub-8 minutes at the Ring. In 1997, German magazine Sport Auto started running Nordschleife laps as part of its signature “Supertest” features; in 2000, Porsche claimed the 996 GT3 was the first street-legal car to go sub-8.
But Nürburgring fever didn’t get going until the 2000s. The wildly popular Gran Turismo 4, launched in 2004, included a highly accurate model of the Ring for the first time in a mainstream racing video game. The modern iteration of Top Gear made its first visit to the track in 2005.
The Nürburgring certainly wasn’t unknown before—VHS copies of Ruf’s Faszination video had been passed around for decades by that point—but a huge video game and iconic Top Gear segment that came just at the dawn of the social-media age and a global car culture made it a household name among enthusiasts.
Nissan announced in 2009 that the R35 GT-R lapped the Ring in 7:26.7. Not coincidentally, Porsche developed the 997 GT2 RS under the codename 727: It then went on to set a 7:18 lap around the track. At this point, we were well and truly off to the races.
Any performance-car builder worth its salt develops cars at the Nürburgring. The bumpy, undulating track is perfect for honing suspension settings. Engineers will tell you that if you make a car work on the Nürburgring, it’ll work anywhere in the world, and that the opposite isn’t necessarily true. That’s why you’ll see countless prototypes lapping the track during “Industry Pool” test sessions available only to automakers.
It was huge news when, in 2013, Porsche was the first to break the 7-minute barrier with the 918 Spyder, and then it became a huge arms race to beat it. Here, though, is where we run into the first issue—the 918 Spyder’s 6:57 lap isn’t directly comparable to more recent Nürburgring times. In fact, by the current standard, it might not have been under 7 minutes at all.
For years, the entrance and exit to the Nordschleife was along the short T13 straight at the start of the lap. There was a gap between the start and finish lines that effectively bypassed the T13 straight. Sport Auto’s lap times are measured between these two points, and that’s the standard everyone followed.
But in 2019, the Nürburging itself decided to create a formal process for lap timing that automakers could follow. If a car company wants to announce a Nürburgring lap time, it has to play by the track’s rules. And the track’s official policy is that there is one distinct start-finish line at the end of the T13 straight, not discreet start and finish lines. It makes sense on some level, because the “Sport Auto” lap isn’t a full lap of the circuit, but it also sort of invalidates decades of lap times set before 2019.
Some automakers will release a “20.6-kilometer” time alongside the official 20.832-km lap, but they can only really parrot the full lap.
Let’s put this another way. In 2013, Porsche announced the 918 Spyder set a 6:57 lap time; in 2020, it announced that the 991.2 GT3 ran a 6:59.93. Which was quicker? The GT3. Porsche confirmed that the car ran a 6:55.34 on the “short” circuit, beating the 918 by nearly two seconds, but the “official” lap time makes the car seem slower. If an automaker doesn’t reveal a time on the 20.6-kilometer “lap,” we can only estimate that its full lap time would take about 4 to 5 seconds longer.
For the most part, the Nürburgring sanctioning lap timing is a good thing. It ensures that everyone plays by the same rules, and it eliminates any doubt about different telemetry systems or automakers playing fast and loose with what defines a “production car.” But it does also mean that the Ford Mustang GTD, which set a time of 6:52.071, is quicker than the Lamborghini Huracan Performante, which set a time of 6:52.01 on the shorter circuit.
There are other complicating factors. Weather, for one. When a car magazine publishes a 0-60 mph time, it applies weather correction to account for the fact that internal-combustion cars breathe air, and the temperature and pressure of that air may have an effect on their performance. Motor Trend explained it well, but essentially, there’s all sorts of math involved to estimate what the performance would be at 77 degrees ambient with no humidity and a barometric pressure of 29.2348 inHG.
There is no such correction for Nürburgring lap times. And weather plays a huge role there as it does at any track. You want it to be cool so engines make maximum power, but not so cold that the tires don’t grip up. On the flipside, you don’t want it to be so hot that engines are weak and tires are past their peak. And you can forget it if it rains.
It’s quite difficult for automakers to get a time down as a result. Your date window is only so big, and you need to rent out the track exclusively. You’d better hope that the weather cooperates during your allotted time, because it could be months before you get another chance.
The track has also changed over time. Every winter, the track repaves surfaces that need repaving and often makes other changes to curbs and the like. All of this has a huge effect on lap times, as the surface evolves, rubbers in, and/or deteriorates over time. It’s not a problem unique to the Nürburgring—all tracks speed up and slow down over time depending on surface conditions. But it is one more way that makes comparison between multiple cars over time that much more difficult.
Of course, there’s the human element, too. With all due respect to my friends who do instrumented testing for various publications, setting 0-60 mph times and measuring skidpad grip isn’t too difficult to learn if you’re a decent driver. Setting fast laps at the Nürburgring is an entirely different skillset, and one many automakers entrust to pro drivers.
Chevrolet was unusual in having three engineers set lap times in the C8 Corvette Z06, ZR1, and ZR1X recently. Its drivers are all super talented, of course, and very well trained, as GM’s driver development program is incredibly intensive, and all three Corvette lappers had hundreds of laps around the track.
But in not using pros, Chevy opened up debate, intentionally or not, about how much time they left on the table. Of course, unless they had pros lap the cars back-to-back with the development drivers, we’ll never know. And even among pros, there’s variance.
Race-car drivers are famous for making excuses. There’s always a reason why their performance didn’t measure up. But that’s borne from the fact that there are so many variables defining performance.
It’s the same thing with a Nürburgring lap. Unlike a quarter-mile time or a 60-0 braking distance, a Nürburgring lap is not easily repeatable. A great driver could lap consistently during a session, but from day to day, month to month, year to year, there are bound to be a million other factors that impact performance.
I don’t want to dismiss Nürburgring times entirely. Seeing what a car (and driver) can do is impressive, and the trend of times tumbling over the years is a good metric for how performance has evolved. A sub-$200,000 Corvette going well under 7 minutes in the hands of an engineer is an absolute achievement. And frankly, the competition is fun.
To understand the value of a Nürburgring time requires context. More context than the number, or even a list of lap times, can provide.
