The amusing thing to me is that, googling what a good time on the Nurburgring is, it looks like the fastest (street-legal) cars are high 6 minutes, and 7 minutes will still get you into the top 10.
So a passenger van is only 50% slower than the best-in-class. It's probably only 20-30% slower than your typical "fast car".
For context the whole thing came about because Sabine has coached Jeremy Clarkson to get a Jaguar Diesel around the track in under 10 min. He made it just and some comments from Sabine lead to the second challenge to do it in a van.
So she was 8 seconds slower than a Jaguar driven by Jeremy, who drives for a living :-)
Definitely try to find some snippets of those episodes, very entertaining