Nürburgring lap record is 'ultimate' test, so pressure on test drivers is enormous

Take a minute if you will to consider the feat of one Maro Engel, who one day in late October, navigated his way around the Nürburgring’s fearsome ‘Nordschleife’ northern loop in 6min 35.1sec. His steed for the day was Mercedes’ new AMG One hypercar, complete with its Formula 1-derived 1.6-litre engine and total of 1015bhp gathered from it and its associated hybrid systems.

Let’s just put that in perspective. The Nürburgring 1000km was held on the Nordschleife alone just once, in 1983 and had Maro and his Merc been around at the time and eligible, they’d have qualified on the second row of the grid in fourth position, some four seconds faster than the Porsche 956 with the not inconsiderable talents of Jonathan Palmer, Keke Rosberg and Jan Lammers on the driver roster. Now, it is true that the track has since been reprofiled a little here and levelled off of a touch there, but so too is it true that the 956 was a slicks and wings prototype, boasting full ground effect, high downforce sprint bodywork, not much more than half the weight of the AMG One and a considerably superior power to weight ratio.

Now, Maro is an exceptional driver, a Nürburgring expert and former winner of its 24 hour race but that lap is still quite a thing to consider when you take into account it was completed by a fully homologated road car on treaded tyres. It’s so fast the Nürburgring created a brand new ‘Super Sports’ category in which it alone resides. At least for now.

But the truth is, the car should have gone faster still. The Eifel weather at the end of October is rarely conducive to setting red hot lap times and Maro had to contend with a track that was damp in some places, dirty in other. Clearly it was a very impressive achievement.

Or was it? Let’s look at it from the other direction and point out first of all that Maro’s time was just over eight seconds faster than the previous holder of the production car lap record, the Porsche 911 GT2 RS MR. Eight seconds sounds a lot, but it has to be seen in the context of a lap fully 12.9 miles long. At a track like the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit, that actually equates to about a 2.2 sec advantage, which doesn’t seem like quite so much at all.

The pressure comes not only from the press and marketing people who won’t have a story to sell if you don’t deliver the goods on the track, but also the simulations the manufacturers run. ‘We know in advance how fast the car should be,’ Lars said, ‘so the pressure to match what the simulations say is enormous.’

It is to me quite clear where this is going to end, and it’s going to painful, hopefully only for the wallet of the manufacturer whose car ends up in the barrier at some appalling speed. Guys like Lars and Maro are as good as they get at this sort of thing which is why they get to do it, but if they are so mentally stretched that two laps are enough to finish them off for the day and with cars going ever faster, then sooner or later something is going to go wrong. And depending on just how badly wrong it goes, the days of setting road car lap records for PR purposes may then be over. I hope not, but not as much as I hope whoever is in the car at the time is as lucky as was Bellof in 1983 and emerges without a scratch.