Video: Goodwood star smashes Nürburgring production‑car lap record

Join veteran Dutch racer Michael Vergers, a two-time winner of the Goodwood Revival’s showpiece RAC TT Celebration race in a Jaguar E-type Lightweight, as he smashes his own lap record around the infamous, 14-mile German rollercoaster.

Vergers is armed with a Radical SR8LM and his commitment – using every inch, and a little bit more, of a place once described by three-time World Champion Sir Jackie Stewart as the ‘green hell’ – in the 2.8-litre, V8-engined Radical is astonishing.

Vergers heads out of the makeshift pits halfway down the Dottinger Höhe straight and is already clocking 135mph as he plummets under the Antoniusbuche bridge and into the compression before bypassing the modern Grand Prix loop and heading down into the wooded Hatzenbach.

Sections that for years have struck fear into professional racers and amateur trackday enthusiasts alike – Flugplatz, Fuchsröhre, Bergwerk, Karussell, Wippermann, Pflanzgarten and Schwalbenschwanz – are dispatched with ease by the ex-Formula Ford champion-turned sportscar racer in the 450bhp, 650kg screamer.

Vergers stops the clock at 6m48s, some eight seconds quicker than his own previous marker, also in a Radical SR8, set in 2005.  

The purists among you will be wondering how quick racing cars used to go around the Nordschleife before it closed for international business in 1983. Well, in qualifying for the final 1,000km World Sportscar Championship event on the old circuit in May that year, German ace Stefan Bellof guided the factory Rothmans Porsche 956 to a 6m11s lap. So, that’s some 37 seconds quicker, some 26 years earlier.

That’s how quick!