PORSCHE DEVELOPMENT DRIVER Lars Kern has outdone himself at the Nürburgring. Driving a pre-series Taycan, he posted a lap time of 7:07.55 minutes on the Nordschleife. This official time is an almost unbelievable 26 seconds faster than his last record drive in a Taycan S Sport sedan equipped with the performance package, back in August 2022.
“Twenty-six seconds is half an eternity in motorsport. Lars’ lap time of 7:07.55 minutes on the Nordschleife is sensational, putting the Taycan in the same league as electric hypercars,” says head of the model line, Kevin Giek. “And the impressive thing about it is that over several laps, Lars clocked almost exactly the same time.”
“I pushed as hard as I could, but that was really all I could do,” says Kern. The 20.8km Nürburgring-Nordschleife was at the exclusive disposal of the experienced racer for the day of fast laps. For safety reasons, the test car was equipped with the legally prescribed roll cage, along with racing bucket seats. Compared to the 2022 record in a Taycan Turbo S, the times were significantly better: the pre-series car was a good 25 km/h faster heading into the Schwedenkreuz. To illustrate the difference further, by the time Kern crossed the finish line near Grandstand 13 (T13), he would have only just been passing the entrance to the Nordschleife, about to enter the Antoniusbuche section, during his record drive in the Taycan Turbo S in 2022. This put the distance between the pre-series Taycan and the current Turbo S at more than 1.3 kilometres – a figure that illustrates the leap in performance achieved on the 20.8 km course in Germany’s Eifel region. An onboard video of the complete lap will be published in mid-March – we can’t wait to see it because, and we speak from experience, Nürburgring is one seriously scary race track. And getting around it in 7 minutes and eight seconds is hair-raisingly fast.
For the record, the fastest ever time around the Nürburgring was also achieved in a Porsche: 5:19.55 minutes in a Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo, a development of the brand’s Le Mans prototype race car.