Some say the Nürburgring Nordschleife experience 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 lap ends. It is the longest race track in the world. It is fast. And the track is in the mountains, so, the driver experiences 300 m/1000 ft of elevation changes.
A lap time on the race track depends of a lot of things, but most important are the driver, the car, the tyres, tyre pressures, the traffic and ambient conditions. The best is dry weather with temperature around 15 °C/60 °F.
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 equipped/modified/prepared. Finally, 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, Stefan Bellof drove at record speed in the qualification covering the 20.832 km Nordschleife (Northern Loop) in only 6:11,13. This translated to 125 mph/202 km/h average speed and the record standed for 35 years. In 2018, Timo Bernhard managed to beat it with the specially prepared (not racing legal anymore) Porsche 919 Evo. His record of 5 minutes and 19 seconds is a totally unreal lap time, but Stefan Bellof's time is not worse considering when it was made and with a car that had two times less power, a car that had to comply with the FIA regulations, had the tyre technology of the eighties, had no traction control, no 4WD, a manual transmission.
Record runs are now measured on the full Nordschleife that is 20.832 km long. Earlier, in many occasions, the time was started after the T13 grand stand and stopped before T13 giving the track length of 20.600 km. During the tourist days the main straight is used for getting to the track and then the time can be measured with the stop watch from Bridge to Gantry. This is so-called BTG time. The length of the BTG track is around 19.1 km.
