These Are Jalopnik's Favorite Nürburgring Videos

By now we all know that the Nürburgring Nordschleife is a magical, mysterious, alluring and dangerous place, and through various unofficial lap record attempts by manufacturers, we now use it as a benchmark for performance cars.

Even someone like me, who has never been there, can imagine how it feels to hit Flugplatz at speed, or to rip around the Karusell, with the whole car threatening to shake itself to pieces. This is because, in addition to video games like Forza or Gran Turismo, Nürburgring lap videos exist, and they're awesome.

These are some of our favorites.

We knew that the 919 Hybrid was fast. I mean, it won Le Mans outright multiple times. None of us were really prepared for how fast it would be with all of the FIA's restrictions removed. This video showed us and it's still wild now.

As car enthusiasts, we all like to imagine that we could be racecar drivers if only we had the money, time and talent necessary but that's simply not true, and it's this video that disabused me of those delusions. The sheer bravery/stupidity necessary to maintain this pace on the Ring at night with zero visibility is unreal.

Stefan Belloff maybe isn't a household name, even for race fans, but his unbelievable skill and lack of fear behind the wheel allowed him to set a mind-bending 6 minute 11 second lap time around the Nordschleife back in 1983 in a Porsche 956. Sadly he was killed not long after in a crash at Spa.

The Ring isn't a kind place, especially to motorcycles, and that's part of why bikes have never really been able to keep pace with the fastest cars there. Still, for someone to go out on a bike that was less than $10,000 when new and set this kind of pace is just staggering.

Misha is the king of Nurburgring videos these days and the pace he carries in the already brutally fast AMG GT Black Series is incredible. The sheer number of cars he overtakes borders on heroic and this is a super fun video.

The current GT3 RS is a wild looking and wildly impractical take on the ultimate aero 911, but Andy Preuninger and his crew don't mess around and this video is certainly evidence of that.

This is what happens when you get a bunch of German execs drunk and pitch a Formula 1 engined hybrid hypercar to them. The AMG ONE is so extreme and so rare that getting this perspective of one being driven in anger feels really special.

The VW ID.R is a wild electric machine that absolutely slaughtered Pikes Peak, and this video shows it and its pilot Romain Dumas doing the same thing at the Ring with a time that beats Stefan Belloff's famous 1983 time. It's a staggering thing to watch.

It's not just the Europeans that can have fun at the Green Hell. Us Americans can boogie there too, something which is clearly evidenced by this lap video of the utterly unhinged Viper.

Something about really, really fast naturally aspirated Hondas just gets their claws in me and hearing this K24 scream its guts out for 7:29 is just incredible. People who complain about front wheel drive have clearly never driven something like this.