Only three race cars have ever gone quicker around this famous track.
When it comes to automotive bragging rights, a good Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time is right up there with the best of them. And today, those bragging rights belong to Ford. The automaker revealed that its GT Mk IV, an evolution of the mid-engined supercar it created in 2016, is now the fastest production car to ever lap the 12.9-mile (20.8-km) race track in Germany, with a time of 6 minutes, 15.997 seconds set by Frédéric Vervisch.
The century-old racetrack in Germany’s Eifel region was built during the Great Depression as a way to create jobs but also to provide Germany’s car industry with a place to test its products. In addition to races, it was—and remains—open to the public for leisure driving.
Well, for some definition of leisure: The place isn’t known as the Green Hell for nothing, with hundreds of feet of elevation change across 12.9 miles (20.8 km) and between 73–170 corners, depending how you count them. After years of driving it online, I got my first laps there last summer and can report that in real life, it is bumpy and narrow, and I’d need another hundred laps or so before I started to feel properly comfortable.
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