SPEED MACHINE

Stefan Bellof’s Nürburgring record stood for over three decades, a lifetime in motorsport. Then Porsche decided that it could beat itself...

Like all good stories, it started over a beer. Porsche was leaving endurance racing and the team behind the 919 Hybrid – a three-time Le Mans winner – were consoling themselves with a few ales when they came up with a plan. Why not free the car of all its stifling World Endurance Championship restrictions, to see how fast a hybrid prototype can really go? Then take it to some iconic race circuits, to show the public exactly what a car with no limits can achieve…

Less than a year later, the 919 Evo toppled a 35-year-old lap record at – where else – the Nürburgring. Sure, a new ’Ring record is trumpeted on a near-weekly basis, but this one came with no confusing caveats or qualifiers. It’s not the fastest front-wheeldrive this or seven-seat that; it’s the fastest car ever around the Nordschleife. Surely everyone can get excited about that.

The time it had to beat was the 6m11.13s posted by the late Stefan Bellof and his Porsche 956 in 1983, during a qualifying session for the Nürburgring 1000km. When the 919 Evo pottered around the ’Ring alongside a similar 956 before the start flag of the 2018 Nürburgring 24 Hours, you could be in no doubt what Porsche had planned.

If there was one thing I absolutely had to see this year, it was Porsche taking on its own history. Thus I found myself, early on the morning of 29 June, watching a gaggle of brightly coated safety marshals having a quick chat with the 919’s pit crew before heading off to their posts, ready to be driven past quicker than they ever have been. Perhaps ever will be.

The calm among the crew was surprising, until I chatted to them and realised just how many months’ work has been spent on simulators and in test sessions leading up to this point. The 919 Evo’s lap record at Spa-Francorchamps a month earlier, while outrageously impressive, was a mere test session to get the car set up nicely for a bigger, more infamous circuit just the other side of Belgium’s border.

So what exactly is the Evo? It’s Porsche’s retired LMP1 car with no limits. A flight of fancy for a bunch of engineers whose ingenuity had been pinned back by the WEC’s desire to keep a balanced, tightly packed grid. So the petrol-electric powertrain’s turned up to 1,200bhp, active aerodynamics help increase downforce by 50 per cent (from an already dizzying level) and clever torque-vectoring has been implemented. The car can individually brake each of its wheels, learning a circuit map so that it knows exactly how and when to do it.

Which might make you ponder the need for a driver, but one with vast experience (and vast cojones) was still required. That driver was Timo Bernhard. When Porsche announced the programme, he’d stuck his hand straight up for this leg of the ‘919 Tribute Tour’ – which also saw it beat Formula One cars to the Spa lap record – and he got the job off the back of his huge CV of wins at the ’Ring.

Simulations suggested a 5m30s lap was within pretty easy reach, so the night before, he was in a relaxed frame of mind. “It’s not like going into qualifying,” he told me. “There’s no pressure, no competition. With this kind of speed, the challenge is not to get carried away. The kerbs are big, and there’s a very fine line where you can go with this car.”

Track time began at 8am. Porsche wanted it earlier, for lower temperatures, but the raucous ‘BANG’ the 919 makes on upshifts put paid to that. Don’t want to go waking the neighbours unduly early, after all. First up was a gentle sighting lap, and as a few of us enthusiastically gathered to watch it through Pflanzgarten, we were ever so slightly disappointed by just how undramatic the car looked. Turns out that visually tame lap was a 6m38s – quicker than any road car has ever been timed around the ’Ring. Yikes.

A quicker, warm-up lap followed. There seemed barely time to take breath between Timo leaving and returning to the pits, almost like he’d tripped through a loop in time and arrived back two minutes early; the so called ‘warm up’ was a 5m31s. Cautious applause rippled

through the team, before they fitted a new set of tyres (the 919 required brand new bespoke Michelins each lap) and Timo went out for a proper go. Louder celebrations this time, as he returned 5m24s later. Well within the team’s targets and 47 seconds ahead of Bellof’s legendary time. But Timo wasn’t content yet, and when he identified places he could “clean up the lap”, another set of Michelins were wheeled out. He returned with a 5m19.546s to rapturous applause and flag-waving worthy of a royal wedding.

“It was not a walk in the park,” he told me afterwards. “This is probably the most challenging track on Earth. I didn’t want to arrive and say, ‘That’s the lap time I’m targeting.’ I just wanted a car I was comfortable with and which I could generate speed in. Then in the end, whatever lap time comes out, comes out.”

Hours after the record was publicly announced, the on-board video landed. You have to watch it. All but the most idiotic online commenters admitted their jaws were on the floor. While lots of people bemoan the lack of official regulation when it comes to timed Nordschleife laps, it appears the one way to beat it is with a car that follows no rules whatsoever. A car whose creation began with a round of beer.