Earlier this year we saw Mercedes-AMG roll out its most powerful V8 ever, the GT Black Series, and the automaker has wasted little time in showing what it can do. While street legal, the 4-liter twin turbo was designed to do its business primarily on the racetrack, and having just rounded the Nürburgring Nordschleife faster than any production car before it, business appears to be pretty good.
With a 0 to 100km/h (62 mph) time of 3.2 seconds and a top speed of 325 km/h (202 mph), thanks to 720 peak horsepower and 800 Nm (590 lb-ft) of torque, the GT Black Series was always going to push the limits of what street-legal sports cars can do. Ahead of the record-setting run, AMG made a few performance-oriented tweaks to the GT Black Series, extending its carbon fiber front splitter to the “Race” configuration and adjusting the lower and upper wing blades of the rear spoiler, along with the camber angle and traction control.
With things set up just the way he wanted, driver Maro Engel took to the famously demanding Nürburgring-Nordschleife racetrack and completed the 12.8-mile-long (20.5-km) North Loop in 6:43.616 min. This shaved more than a full second off the 6:44.97 record set by the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ in 2018, while the GT Black Series' official time for the complete 12.944-mile-long track was 6:48.047.
"That was a really impressive ride," said Engel. "With speeds of up to almost 168 mph (270 km/h) in the Kesselchen section of the track and well over 186 mph (300 km/h) on the long Döttinger Höhe straight, the AMG GT Black Series is significantly faster than my GT3 race car. To finally drive around the Nordschleife in 6:48.047 minutes with a production road car in these track conditions is really awesome. Like my GT3 race car, the AMG GT Black Series offers a lot of adjustment possibilities, all of which enabled me to create a setup that was tailor-made for me."
You can watch the lap in full in the video below.
Source: Mercedes-Benz