A new record lap time was posted in a Ford GT at the Nürburgring this past weekend. But before you get too excited, we should note that it wasn’t the new GT, it certainly wasn’t street-legal, and it wasn’t clocked strictly on the Nordschleife.
The time of 7:58.558 was posted by Nico Verdonck, driving a race-prepped example of the previous Ford GT (with the old supercharged V8, not the new turbo six) in the VLN race. The Veranstaltergemeinschaft Langstreckenpokal Nürburgring series is an endurance championship that competes only at the Ring.
Now you may be thinking that Verdonck’s time is a good minute slower than road-going supercars like the Porsche 918 Spyder and Lamborghini Aventador SV have managed. But where those times were posted only on the 20.8-kilometer (12.9-mile) Nordschleife, Verdonck’s lap hustled around a combined layout of both the Nordschleife and part of the grand prix circuit for a total distance of 24.4 kilometers (or 15 miles).
That works out proportionately faster than any road-going supercar has ever sped around the Nordschleife, and faster than anything has ever lapped the combined 24.4-km track – if only by half a second. The previous record was set at another VLN race in August 2014 by Jens Klingmann who clocked a lap of 7:59.045 in a BMW Z4 GT3.
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