(December 6, 2013) The McLaren name was born on the racetrack and, 50 years on, is the most successful name in global motorsport. That desire and determination to push for every extra tenth of a second, and obsessive focus on perfection, has seen the final development objective for the now sold out McLaren P1 achieved: a sub-seven minute lap time of the Nürburgring circuit.

From the outset, the 903-horsepower McLaren P1 has been developed with one clear goal: to be the best driver’s car on both road and track. To achieve this, the development program has focussed on ensuring the McLaren P1 pushes the boundaries in terms of sheer performance, with testing carried out in some of the harshest conditions around the world. But one challenge remained, and that was arguably the toughest of them all.

Nearly 13 miles driven at an average speed in excess of 110 mph. Sounds easy, until you add in more than 150 corners, 300 meters of elevation changes and cornering forces of up to 2g. All in less than seven minutes…

Commenting on the sub-seven achievement by the McLaren P1, McLaren Formula 1 driver and 2009 world champion Jenson Button said: "The fact that the McLaren P1 has posted a sub-seven-minute lap at the Nürburgring is unbelievably impressive.



"I’ve been an F1 driver for 14 years, and I’ve driven more than 240 Grands Prix and, although I’ve never raced an F1 car on the Nürburgring-Nordschleife circuit, because the last time the German Grand Prix was held there was before I was born, I know exactly how challenging, and daunting, a racetrack it is.

"Over the past dozen-or-so years I’ve owned a lot of ultra-high-performance road cars. I’ve driven the McLaren P1 on a number of occasions – including up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where it was sensational – and I think it’s a truly superb machine: unbelievably refined yet unbelievably quick.

"But, as I say, for it to have recorded a sub-seven minute lap time around the Nürburgring is the icing on the cake: proof positive, backed by hard data, on the greatest racetrack of them all, that McLaren has created a genuine game-changer."

The Nürburgring-Nordschleife is the toughest test track to measure the all-round performance of any car.  And among the McLaren P1’s performance targets, which included accelerating to 186 mph in less than 17 seconds onto a limited top speed of 217 mph, was to achieve a sub-seven minute time around the German circuit.

The manufacturer has not issued an exact time, suggesting it failed to beat the Porsche 918's record time of 6 minutes 57 seconds.