Under the pseudonym Franz Hermann, Max Verstappen turned heads earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Out of the blue, the four-time F1 champion rocked up at the iconic Nordschleife in a GT3 car, and promptly recorded an unofficial lap record.<\/p>\n
Verstappen has now revealed more details as to how that lap came about in a conversation with presenter Chris Harris.<\/p>\n
“The team, Emil Frey, which owns our GT3 car, said I could drive under an alias,” Verstappen laughed. “They asked if I had any ideas.<\/p>\n
“Then I thought, ‘Let’s make it extremely German.’ Franz Hermann sounded good to me.”<\/p>\n
Verstappen went on to remark that GT3s is “just one of my passions”, adding, “I love racing. I also have a racing team now, giving one of my sim drivers [Chris Lulham] a chance in the real world.”<\/p>\n
But then what were Verstappen’s lap times?<\/p>\n
“My first lap was a 7:56 on the VLN configuration (which combines the Nordschleife and the N\u00fcrburgring F1 circuit). A few weeks earlier, the pole position was a 7:51, so that was good.<\/p>\n
“We drove with a full tank, of course, because we wanted to do more laps in a row. The second lap was a 7:54, and then I made a pit stop to let my sim driver do a few laps.”<\/p>\n
On his second outing, Verstappen said: “Then I went out again with a new set of tyres, and I drove a good 7:48.<\/p>\n
“The car was very nice to drive. I felt comfortable because I had already driven thousands of laps in the simulator.”<\/p>\n
With that lap, Verstappen would have broken the VLN\/NLS GT3 record held by Christian Krognes, who recorded a 7:49.578s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under the pseudonym Franz Hermann, Max Verstappen turned heads earlier this year. Out of the blue, the four-time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,827,830,828,831,829,826,813,823,825,806,805,824,803,804,822,85],"class_list":["post-33391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motorsport","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}