Mercedes S-Class Pullman, is this you?

Long wheelbase news of the day: a YouTube enthusiast by the name of ‘TouriClips' has uploaded what looks like the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class Pullman hot-footing it around the Nürburgring.

The S-Class whatnow? The Pullman will replace now-dead Maybach at the top of the Merc range, offering legroom-tastic luxury to Planet Earth's most discerning oligarchs, sheiks and dictators.

How do we know this is the Pullman, then? We'd love to tell you it's the subtle kink of the C-pillar, but really it's rather more obvious: the sheer length of the Mercedes in the footage.

Sure, the new S-Class is no thin-hipped, skinny-jeans wearing hipster, but this prototype utterly dwarfs it in size. Some parts of the car may actually be longer than the Nürburgring itself.

It's going along at a fair whack too, which shows the faith Mercedes is putting in its upcoming land yacht.

Of course, we know that Mercedes-Benz plans to introduce many new variants of its lovely new S-Class over its lifetime. We've already seen the short and long wheelbase versions, there's a mooted convertible S-Class in the pipeline and now this Pullman version too.

What else? There'll be an armoured car, as well as a fully-electric S-Class at some point in the near future, once the battery technology has caught up with Mercedes' exacting demands on range and power.

You can read more about the new S-Class here, and get up to date on its history by clicking this link here.

But here's food for thought - wouldn't a Pullman one-make race series be superb? A bit like in 1984, at the opening of the then-new Nürburgring, when Merc supplied a field of 190 Es to a roster of F1 drivers and Senna took the win. Only much... longer. And tiltier. Imagine the paint-swapping duels. Imagine the crashes. Imagine baddies hanging out of the rear windows, firing at each others' tyres...

Top Gear drives Senna's old Merc

A brief history of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class