Nurburgring Times Won’t Mean Anything Without Oversight

Until a third party adjudicator is in place to evaluate the validity of times, we won’t be able to glean anything real from a manufacturer claimed lap time. 

It all started thirty years ago with the Ruf CTR Yellowbird. Back then, the 2,500 pound 911-based Ruf turned an incomprehensible time of 8:05 around the 12.9-mile circuit in the Eifel Mountain region of Germany. Before that, the ‘Ring was simply a race track without much in the way of street car consequence, aside from the fact that you could drive on it just like any other toll road. Since that fateful day in 1987, however, this track has become a marketing tactic to sell sports cars. Call us cynical, but these lap times no longer mean anything.

A completely different, but still bright yellow Porsche-based turbocharged special re-took that lap record earlier this year in the form of the 991 GT2 RS. Porsche did more than most do, releasing the full video of their record lap, and setting similar times multiple times with multiple cars and multiple drivers. The 6:47 lap time that they set, however, remains as unofficial as if I were to claim to have run a 100-meter dash faster than Usain Bolt. There’s no sanctioning body to verify my time, and there is no official timing judge to confirm Porsche’s.

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More importantly than timing, however, is the fact that no independent body to verify that all of the cars to run these lap times actually are “production spec”. What is to stop Porsche or Lamborghini or Nissan or whoever from fitting their car with a set of ‘cheater’ tires, or higher octane fuel, or a more powerful Nurburgring specification engine or special track-spec tuning to the ECU or suspension or gearbox? The fact is, nobody knows what goes into the cars that have won these ludicrously fast lap times. It’s about time we should.

Perhaps, then, it is time that a lap battle day was held for all manufacturers to bring their efforts to compete. If every car were on the same track on the same day with an impartial professional driver setting a lap in each car, and private judges on hand to confirm that each car has a production VIN and engine casting, we might have a modicum of civility in the record-setting business. Furthermore, we might increase the level of safety of these record attempts by including mandates for roll cages, fire suppression systems, and fuel cutoff mechanisms. Not only do we want to see a more competitive timing process, we’d like to see a safer one.