The day of the electric car may be close — but if you want all-out performance then petrol still gives you the biggest bang for your buck. The point hardly needs proving but we decided to do it anyway by taking two of the fastest, fire-breathing, petrol-guzzling sports cars across Europe to the Nürburgring, high in the Eifel mountains in Germany. At about 13 miles, this is the world’s longest racetrack and could have been tailor-made for a shootout between the legendary Nissan GT-R and the supercharged Jaguar XKR.

Even for competent racing drivers, the Nürburgring is daunting — Jackie Stewart, one of the last to race there before it was closed to Formula One after Niki Lauda’s near-fatal accident in 1976, described it as the “green hell”, a grim reference to the forest the track winds through and the fact that more racing drivers have died or been injured there than at any other circuit.

Naturally, the thing that makes the Nürburgring dangerous also draws people to it. Hence what began as a friendly difference of opinion between me and Jason Dawe, a Sunday Times colleague, over the amount by which the Nissan could beat the Jag, turned into a 1,000-mile road trip to the Ring and back.

The Nissan, championed by Dawe, is, on paper, quicker in every respect than its rival and has completed the Nürburgring in 7min 26sec, nearly a minute faster than the Jag. But since the Jag set its lap time of 8min 25sec, its engine power has been upgraded to 500bhp and its all-round performance improved.

The problem was that the rules of the Ring prevent racing. And you can’t rely on lap times because conditions vary lap by lap, according to how crowded the track is, the speed of the car ahead of you and sudden and dramatic changes in weather.

So we settled on a simple, less serious test for the two cars. We selected two music tracks of a duration that would challenge the cars’ capabilities: Bruce Springsteen’s Jungleland (just over 9½min) and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird (just over 9min). The aim was to complete the circuit before the tracks finished on the cars’ CD players. It may not sound like a tough challenge, especially when earlier this month the Gumpert Apollo — all 700bhp of it — set a new lap record of just under 7min 12sec, the fastest time for any road-legal car. But on the Nürburgring anything under 9½min isn’t bad, for an amateur, and anything under 9min is fast.

If you’re serious about lap times, you can practise driving the Nürburgring on computer games such as Gran Turismo 4 or Project Gotham Racing. Its 73 named corners (and about 100 more unnamed), including hairpins and sweeping curves separated by long straights — where you can reach maximum speed, only to end up in the Armco barrier if you fail to brake in time — help maintain its reputation as the most treacherous circuit in the world. Not only that, but it falls and rises about 1,000ft, making it a rollercoaster on tarmac.

It will cost you €22 (£19) to take your car for a single lap; a small price to discover how brave, or perhaps how foolish, you are. Serious accidents are a regular occurrence, and there are multiple fatalities almost every year.

The Nürburgring is open to the public typically on Sundays and weekday evenings, except in winter when it is often closed for weeks, covered in snow. A four-lap ticket costs €75. Once past the toll barrier and the cones, you can give the car the full beans.

Then it’s hard on the brakes for the first left-hand bend; into the Hatzenbach; full on the power for the broad arc as you come out of Hocheichen; and fast over the crests at Quiddelbacher Höhe and the Flugplatz. You should feel some liftoff at this point if you’re going quickly enough — but remember, this is where Chris Irwin, the British racing driver, ended his career when he flipped his Ford sports prototype during practice for the 1968 Nürburgring endurance race.

Next the circuit takes you through Aremberg. If you get the line right through this bend, you can slingshot into the Fuchsröhre section. Watch out for the dip, particularly in the wet. There’s a tricky left-right combination taking you into Adenauer Forst, then a hairpin that’s hidden from view.

Then comes one of the scariest stretches on the circuit: a nameless, steep, downhill section that culminates in an “S” combination and a triple right. The sensation here is similar to a bungee jump. As soon as you hit bottom you are flying back up through Ex-Mühle and into Bergwerk, the corner where Lauda crashed. The next mile and a bit are largely uphill to two of the tightest bends on the circuit. The Klostertal is a drifter’s dream, if it’s traffic-free, but a nightmare if you hit congestion. Karussell (the Carousel) is blind and sharply banked. To make matters worse, the low afternoon sun will probably blind you as you enter.

You are now approaching the highest part of the circuit, near Hohe Acht. At this point, you’re more than halfway round and over the worst. From then on it’s downhill most of the way to the finish line, though there are more challenging bends to catch the unwary and send them into the Armco.

Dawe and I proved the Nissan and the XKR are more closely matched than you might expect, given the GT-R’s reputation as a track car and the fact that it was honed on the Nürburgring in its final stages of development.

How close? At the end of four laps each, the gap had shrunk to a few seconds. Weight made a big difference; between laps Dawe shed rubber floor mats and a road atlas from the GT-R and I removed camera equipment from the XKR. Bit by bit, we shaved off seconds to finish ahead of Jungleland’s 9½min. The Freebird target remained tantalisingly out of reach for the Jag. Dawe’s fastest lap time was 9min 3sec with the Jag 4sec behind.