No, you are not seeing things, there seems to be a real possibility that the Porsche 919 Evo will lap the Nurburgring Nordschleife in under 5 minutes.
A couple of days ago, Porsche’s unrestricted LMP1 car hit the most famous racetrack of them all for what’s believed to have been shakedown testing. With Le Mans-winner and ‘Ring veteran Timo Bernhard behind the wheel, the car apparently set a number of sub-6 minute laps as he got the feel of the car and re-accustomed to the track.
However, the Porsche 919 Evo seems to be capable of achieving much more.
The lap record will fall
As YouTuber Misha Charoudin notes, the car went much faster later in the day. Charoudin was lucky enough to be standing near a marshal post during one of the flying laps and was able to hear over the radio when the car passed certain sections of the track. Using the production car lap record of the Porsche 911 GT2 RS as a reference, Charoudin predicts the 919 Evo could have set a time of 5:09 if Bernhard hadn’t coasted in the final section.
That’s not the end of the story. During the high-speed runs, the track temperature at the circuit often exceeded 50 degrees Celsius, far hotter that what is optimal for setting lap records. What’s more, this was apparently just a data-gathering run and if the German marque plugs the lap into its simulator, Bernhard will probably get faster and faster.
Whatever the final time proves to be, it seems obvious Stefan Bellof won’t hold the record for much longer.