Two months ago Porsche revealed that their new Panamera Turbo S completed a full lap of the legendary Nürburgring Nordschleife over a distance of 20.832 kilometres in 7:29.81 minutes. This gave it the title of fastest “executive car” and Mercedes-AMG were not too happy about this.
They made it very clear that they would take back the title and it seems they have stuck to their guns.
To be clear the GT 63 S set a lap time of 7:23.009 on the ‘shorter’ circuit but to compare the time against the Panamera, you would need to look at the new ‘full lap’ time which comes in at 7:27.800.
In 2019, the Nürburgring 1927 GmbH & Co. KG established a different method for timing laps. It starts and stops the clock at the same point in turn 13. The result is a circuit that’s 761.155 feet (232 meters) longer for a total of 12.944 miles (20.83 kilometers). This measure results in the 7:27.800 lap time.
Development engineer, Demian Schaffert, was behind the wheel at the time and thanks to newly tuned elastokinematics and other little tweaks, it beat its previous time by 2.3 seconds.
So technically speaking, the AMG is now the king of the ‘Ring in luxury class and not the four-door record holder as this still ‘belongs’ to the Jaguar XE SV Project 8. We say ‘belongs’ as it does not have rear seats and so the other automakers don’t consider the model to be in the same class.
