A lot of lip-service is often paid to the question of what you could do with a race car if not for the regulations keeping it in check. But Porsche actually made good on the notion with the 919 Evo. And that's the subject of its latest Top 5 video.

A derestricted version of the 919 Hybrid that dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the broader FIA World Endurance Championship for three years running, the Evo was an exercise in the lack of restraint. The basic elements remained, but everything else was turned up to 11.

Without fuel-flow restrictors, the highly strung 2.0-liter turbo four kicked out 710 horsepower, and the electric motors another 434. The resulting combined 1,144 hp was further unburdened by 86 pounds of excess weight. The suspension was retuned, the aerodynamics made even more aggressive, and... well, we'll let Porsche's own championship-winning drivers tell you the rest. But the results speak for themselves.

Last April, Porsche revealed the 919 Evo at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium where Neel Jani (featured in this video) took the outright lap record with a lap time of 1:41.77.

That was almost a full second faster than Lewis Hamilton's top qualifying time in the Mercedes W08 grand-prix racer, and was only beaten by two or three tenths by this year's top F1 drivers.

The more telling sign of the 919's performance came in June, however, when Timo Bernhard unleashed the Evo at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. His lap time of 5:19.546 was almost a minute faster than the record that Stefan Bellof set in another Porsche – the legendary 956 – decades prior, and almost a minute and a half faster than the best time the road-going 911 GT2 RS managed, even with Manthey-Racing upgrades.