5 Stupidly Fast Nurburgring Lap Times From Non-Production Cars

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (especially the kind with no Wi-Fi) the past few days, you’ve probably noticed that Lamborghini has built on its impressive showings at the Nurburgring with the Huracan Performante. After the Aventador SV set a 6min 59sec lap two years ago, the supercar manufacturer this week announced that it has smashed the Porsche 918 Spyder’s record with a scintillating 6min 52sec lap.

We won’t get caught up in the debate about its legitimacy right now, but what we do want to talk about is the fact it’s not technically the fastest road car. That honour goes to the Radical SR8 LM, although since it’s pretty much a racing car with numberplates, it’s generally not considered a production car.

But that got us thinking. What happens when the reigns are removed and manufacturers can go about pushing the limits of their engineering prowess? Ride heights go out the window, suspension stiffness leans towards extreme and tyres become as slick as Lewis Hamilton’s latest haircut - that’s what. The seven-minute barrier suddenly opens itself up for a battering and the cars below show what happens when engineers are properly set loose.

739bhp, 217mph and £1.5 million – the Zonda R is one of those cars that causes the automotive industry to sit up and take notice. Despite lacking any road-going credibility, this Pagani was the peak of Zonda production which started back in 1999 with the C12. With test driver Marc Basseng at the wheel, the Zonda R screamed its way around the Nordschleife in an astonishing 6min 47.5 seconds.

To put that into perspective, that’s 10 seconds faster than the Porsche 918 Weissach Package using a chassis that has been around for nearly 20 years. The R uses a V12 lifted from the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR, but with no restrictors spoiling the fun, allowing the powertrain to breathe fully. Peak power comes in at 7500rpm and sends the 1070kg R into an entirely different league of performance.

Here we have the car tha tinspired this list. As mentioned, the SR8 LM’s ‘production car’ legitimacy is very much up in the air, hence why the machine can be found on the road car rankings as well. Radical made a point of driving the car from the UK to Germany instead of transporting it, but any sort of adverse weather would have made for a seriously miserable journey.

The SR8 LM manages 0-60mph in 3.2 seconds using a 460bhp 2.8-litre V8 derived from two Hayabusa four-cylinder bike engines welded together and set its blistering lap time in 2009, bettering a standard SR8’s time by seven seconds.

Ferrari 599XX (6:58.16)

After monstering the Enzo at Fiorano by 10 seconds, Ferrari decided to take its limited edition ballistic missile to ‘The Green Hell’ to see just how capable a machine they had produced. Sporting a rear wing, large diffusers front and rear and a tweaked V12 derived from its predecessor, the 599XX didn’t hang around and submitted a time of 6min 58sec – nearly 50 seconds quicker than the road-legal 599 GTB Fiorano.

To bridge the gap between the fourth and fifth generation Vipers, Dodge took the already hardcore ACR and produced the track-only ACR-X. Front canards were implemented (for front axle grip) as well as bespoke exhaust headers which contributed towards a 39bhp increase over the ‘standard’ ACR.

Overall weight was reduced to 1500kg and saw the ACR-X set a 7min 3sec lap, a solid nine seconds quicker than the ACR. It also trashed the ACR’s record at Laguna Seca and could be bought as a track toy for $110,000 (£90,000) back in 2010.

Toyota TMG EV P002 (7:22.329)

Toyota is always a dark horse when it comes to motorsport - take last year’s Le Mans heartbreak for example. A project that may have slipped under your radar is the Toyota TMG EV P002 - the firm’s own electric race car project. The 7min 22.329sec lap in 2012 hacked 25 seconds off the previous EV record which was also set by Toyota in the previous year.

It managed that time - beating heavyweights like the Maserati MC12, Nissan GTR (2011) and the Porsche 911 GT2 RS - by using a performance-orientated electric powertrain developing the equivalent of 462bhp. The TMG EV also smashed the electric record at Pikes Peak not long before the Nurburgring lap and has only been surpassed by the Nio EP9 (7min 5sec).

Modified E46 M3s are now fairly popular at hillclimb events but nothing has quite compared to the effort by Swedish tuners Loaded. By supercharging the car’s straight-six to 525bhp, the Swedes managed to get the 2003 CSL around the Nordschleife five seconds faster than a Pagani Zonda F Clubsport, a relative benchmark at the time.

Adding in upgrades to the brakes and suspension, the M3 managed to also beat the likes of the Porsche Carrera GT, McLaren MP4-12C and Koenigsegg CCR. Its ‘performance’ exhaust system will probably have been the killing blow in terms of making it road-worthy, but the M3 still sits ninth on the non-road-legal Nurburgring rankings.

If you delve into the spectrum of motorsport, these times are truly pummelled into submission. Stefan Bellof raced a Group C Porsche 956 to a 6min 11sec lap (on a slightly modified track layout) in 1983 during a 1000km endurance race. Nikki Lauda also lapped his Ferrari 312T Formula One car in 6min 58sec, although this time was over a much longer track before modifications decreased the lap’s length by around 2km.

Speaking of F1, BMW did some lap simulations in 2006 and estimated that the BMW-Sauber F1.06 could have lapped the ‘Ring in a brain-scrambling 5min 15sec, averaging 147mph. One year later Nick Heidfeld took the car around the Green Hell for real, although it wasn’t full throttle lap, yielding a more modest 8min 34sec time.