Porsche 919 Evo obliterates the all-time Nürburging lap record

We never fail to mention the Nüburging Nordschleife lap times and records while talking about modern supercars and hypercars, but they usually tend to compete with the road-legal times. Once upon a time, a sub-7 lap was insane in a road car but then over the last couple of years, we’ve gotten it down to an even madder lap time of 6m45s or so. But it’s a race track and race cars also have their lap records here. Altogether, the all-time long-standing lap record for the Nürburging northern loop of 6m11.13s was set by Stefan Bellof in a Porsche sports car in 1983 during qualifying. A time that nobody really had a go at.

Today, this morning, a new Porsche has just smashed that and set a new record time of… wait for it… 5m19.546s. Let that sink in. A full lap of the Nürburging Nordschleife, 20.81km of it with 154 turns, in less than five-and-a-half minutes. Holy speed balls! Speaking of, the time has been set by Timo Bernhard, a Le Mans winner with multiple wins at the ‘Ring, behind the wheel of the Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo.

The Evo is the car that Porsche won the 2016 24h of Le Mans with and is now completely free of all WEC restrictions. Turned up to produce around 1200bhp with 50% more downforce than the 2016 LMP1 avatar, it also uses active aero and clever torque vectoring. There’ll be more updates to come so stay tuned and subscribe to The Auto Loons to make sure you don’t miss them.

After lapping Spa faster than a Formula 1 car, Porsche is literally just claiming the ultimate bragging rights as part of this ‘919 Tribute’ tour and it’s just an incredible display of how far automotive technology has come in the recent decades. We just wish we could have been there for it…