To help people understand - the ones who are not interested in race track driving or those quick drivers who have not yet driven on the Nürburgring Nordschleife - how special the experience is, James Herne says it is better than sex. Every lap is so long that when the driver has covered just half of it, there's still minutes of excitement, fear and pleasure ahead before the single lap ends. It is the longest race track in the world, it is fast and the track is located in the mountains so the driver experiences 300 m (984 ft) of elevation changes (the lowest point is 320 m and highest point 620 m above sea level).
A lap time on the race track depends of a lot of things, but most important are the driver, the car, the tyres (although part of the "car", they are most important after the mechanical parts), tyre pressures, ambient conditions (dry weather, temperatures around 15 °C / 60 °F) and traffic on the track. It should be mentioned that the lap times on this page should not be compared to each other one-on-one - the conditions are not the same, the drivers are not the same, it is not known how each car was modified/prepared for the timed lap and the tyres get better every day (if an older car would be equipped with the latest technology tyres, the car would break its former lap record).
Although the page here contains mostly best lap times of street legal Porsches, the quickest Porsche race car laps should be listed, too. A day before the 1983 Nürburgring 1000 km race, on May 28, Stefan Bellof drove at record speed in the qualification covering the then 20.832 km Nordschleife (Northern Loop) in only 6:11,13. This translates to 125 mph/202 km/h average speed. On June 29, 2018, Timo Bernhard managed to beat the 35-year old record with the almost 2 times more powerful Porsche 919 Evo. His 5:19 is a totally unreal lap time, but Stefan Bellof's time is not worse considering it was made 35 years earlier with a car that had half the peak power, which had to comply with the FIA regulations, had the tyre technology of the eighties, had no traction control, no 4WD, a manual transmission and the track was slightly longer.
