I was looking through lap times of different production cars, and there are some wildly out of place cars doing ring laptimes, some cars are faster than they seem they should be, while others are slower than they should be. Which got me thinking how some cars truly get tested in showroom condition, and others get the “marketing” treatment to produce a laptime a showroom car would never touch, solely to sell more cars. Then I found this article that talks exactly about just that.
https://www.thedrive.com/porsche/11012/nurburgring-times-dont-matter
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There’s a huge disparity in drivers, and the Ring is so long that differences get hugely exaggerated. Look at Top Gear times, even among pro drivers you had multiple seconds of disparity and that’s less than 3kms. Let’s say two drivers were 0.25 seconds different on the top gear track in the same car… That’s now nearly TWO seconds different over the distance of the ring. Not only that, but given the length of the lap it is difficult to really nail an entire lap with zero errors which leaves times more skewed.
Then you run into weather differences, a cloud could blow over a third of the way through your lap and cost you 3 seconds over the next 2/3rds.
There’s probably 5 seconds worth of uncontrollable variables for the same driver in the same car at different times of day let alone if we factor different cars, drivers, and not even in the same month for weather.
It is, at the top its only Merc vs VAG showdown, if i wanted to see laptime i check the wiki and sort by Sport Auto’s time, i think its more fair that way
ITT: DAE le slow car fast???
Extra le
Always have been useless. Even as someone who goes to the track regularly i wouldn’t even get close to the pro times. Most consumers never even see a track let alone drive around one. Its all just marketing
And not only that, different cars are going to have different gaps between pro and normal drivers based on their nature.
Its a slightly to moderately interesting metric but anybody who considers it a factor in their purchase decision is a dope. Anything the ring time tells you could should have already been figured out elsewhere.
Never had any meaning
The dude in the red bull x1 on Gran Turismo 5 doing the full circuit in under 3 minutes was nuts
I agree and disagree. The Nordschleife is a better at representing real world performance than the standard racetrack. It’s bumpy, has faults, off camber turns, and lots of elevation. It’s more like racing a Californian canyon road than Spa or Road of America.
Yes a single lap holding the record is nothing but PR. I would want to see how a car performs over 10-15 laps to see what its real performance is. Even still it’s a meaningless metric without a complete review of the car by an auto journalist on the track.
For instance, my GT500 is estimated to be able to perform a 7:11-7:15. It’s roughly around the same time as a 991.2 GT3. But as a novice driver, I’m more than likely able to put down a sub 8 min lap in the Porsche than my GT500.
99.99% of production cars wouldn’t be able to handle 10-15 laps
10 laps of the Nordschleife is over 200 km. I can’t think of any cars with big enough fuel tanks to go full send for 200 km. Most production cars will overheat their brakes and tyres after 1-2 laps of the ring anyways.
Love the GT500, but can you provide a source for saying it would pull a 7:11-7:15 lap time?
That would be leaps and bounds faster than the lap times i’ve seen for it, which if memory serves is closer to 7:39. Manual ZL1 1LE put down a 7:16 flat, for reference.
Fun fact, the Viper ACR holds the record still for the fastest manual transmission Ring time, as well as fastest american car time at 7:01.3!
A 2018 ZL1 Camaro lapped the ring at 7:16. The new GT500 beats the Camaro around all tracks in the U.S.
https://fastestlaps.com/models/ford-mustang-shelby-gt500-s550
So it’s somewhere between a 991.2 GT3 (7:12)and a ZL1 Camaro (7:16)
Nah, ZLE is faster around most
I suspect it’s because the GT500 was tested without the track pack which adds the Cup 2’s. I know for Leguna Seca they had the CFTP.
https://fastestlaps.com/tests/uhk1c6v3dgba
At Eurospeedway they had the normal version with the PS4’s which the 1LE beat. Or the 1LE is just faster in general. I didn’t check every lap time before I made my blanketed statement.
Officially you are right, the best time is 7:39 (#132 overall).
https://fastestlaps.com/models/ford-mustang-shelby-gt500-2013
https://fastestlaps.com/comparisons/lh235vhe828r Zl1 1le track times vs gt500, the gt500 is very close to 1le in most tracks and beats it in two, maybe on a longer track the power might give it an advantage, probably looking at 7:19-7:15 track times for the gt500 more realistically.
yeah high teens is probably doable on the S550 GT500. Again, love the car, but saying it beats the ZLE around all tracks in the US is just demonstrably not true lol
Cheaper too, zle is great, does sacrifice street livability for its times though, gt500 not so much.
Man you’re so right. A ZLE is a track car that can be driven on the street. I know of a few guys that daily them despite the stiffness, but for me the perfect daily would be the shelby.
I daily mine. It’s a ton of fun to be reminded you’re driving something special all the time. You won’t get bored. It also saves 400lbs vs the GT500, which should help slightly with consumables like brakes and tires.
I don’t really see Spa as being all that different. Lots of elevation, mix of high and low(er) speed corners, so fairly similar. Nordschleife has lots more corners, and is bumpier, but the big difference is the length (and number of corners). A small bobble in a single corner & you’ve blown your lap. Those bumps at the Nordschleife make it so much easier to make a mistake, and all those corners give so many more opportunities for mistakes+ any one mistake will kill your lap… So, times at Nordschleife tend to favor cars that are really fast, but reliably so (or at least have big enough pocketbooks to give them enough chances at a good lap). There are some cars that are insanely fast, but more difficult to drive absolutely at the limit. They will be very hard to set a solid laptime with… it’s also rather expensive to have the ring all to yourself to go for that perfect lap, so it’s not like you get all that many attempts at it (unless you have that nice pocketbook behind you of course)
So … I don’t think Nürburgring lap times are a great metric, but I do think they are a better metric than you’d get from lap times on a similar, but shorter, circuit. (Source: I have laptimes at Spa that I’m fairly happy with, but have yet to set a single lap at Nordschleife that I’d say is great, but Harry’s Lap Timer says I have an optimal lap to be proud of)
The point is that the nordshliefe test how the car breaks, turns (at different speeds), speeds up, at 95% which is what most street users will do. It penalizes cars that are very hard to drive and cars that are unstable over bumps and that’s very important to uses.
Sorry but I think Circuit de Spa is nothing like the Nordschleife. Spa has 20 turns over 7 km, 2 high speed sections, and 100 m of elevation change. It also has pretty decent run-offs. The Nordschleife has 150+ turns over 20 km, several high speed sections, 300 m of elevation change, and virtually no run-offs.
Spa is certainly a challenging and dangerous circuit, but the Nordschleife has earned its reputation of being the most dangerous track in the world for a reason.
Other way around. A high horsepower puller masks mistakes better than an agile car.
On most tracks but not the Nurburgring when being compared to cars within similar power levels. The ‘ring pushes cars weights around due to the elevation changes. GT3’s really inspire confidence on the track. The GT500 scares the fuck out of you at the limit.
But it might be somewhat easier to pull together a clean lap in a well balanced car with generally more grip than power, compared to something that wants to blow its tires out through past 4th gear and can carry way more speed on the straights making braking more tricky and critical. There’s also the matter of confidence in the car, which could be worth many seconds alone on a track as long and treacherous as the Ring.
Almost as much as 0-60 times
Or is it 5-60 Wait, 0-100 No, 0-60 but only from that one publication
Something something Miata
Its never been useless. Yes a lot of it is PR. But it gives a neutral, “scientific” datasheet in relation to that car.
Like for example here is the 919 going through the end of section 1. And here is the Nissan GTR Nismo. You can literally feel how the Nissan is resisting to turn/yaw and more or less conclude the downsides of the AWD system. It delivers power, but feels more like work compared to an exige or mx 5, but outmatches both of them - no need to ask a journalist.
By that logic it would also be useless to listen to Chris Harris telling you that car X handles well/meh/subpar.
Quite sure everyone saying it’s useless is referring to a real world commute, as multiple people have stated. Same way the original volt was rated for 200+mpg - PR stats are not always useful in real life.
Edit: was the volt, not the Prius. I get my bullshit stats confused sometimes I guess.
You can literally feel how the Nissan is resisting to turn/yaw and more or less conclude the downsides of the AWD system. It delivers power, but feels more like work compared to an exige or mx 5, but outmatches both of them
How am I supposed to know all of this from looking at the lap time? This seems more like a defense of track testing than of distilling it down to a single number.
Each record attempt comes with a video, from which you can extrapolate the above. The actual lap time itself (IMO) is largely useless, but the tools it provides are useful
Yeah these days you will probably get a video out of it though of course not all times are record attempts so it’s often up to the publication in question. I read the OP more as complaining about spec sheet racing.
Yeah totally, I find the sport auto tests far more interesting.
Agreed. Sport Auto is great for that.
It’s a measuring stick of performance. Much like a 0-60, 1/4 mile, skid pad or braking test. It just puts all of it together on a long track with a ton of varying corners and some high speed sections.
What makes the numbers meaningless are when they mod the car outside of what’s available at the dealership in order to lay down a lap. If I recall properly, Alpha did a bunch of weight reduction, some specific suspension adjustments, and R compound tires, none of which were available from a factory order.
It is a measuring stick, but unlike those other metrics, you can’t apply the same corrections for weather, so there’s going to be less consistency.
I think it’s a good place for car development, but headline times do need a pinch of salt or so.
Another fantastic point. Some laps on record have spots of wet track which can throw away several seconds. Then of course temperature…
Relevant to this discussion and other performance testing -
Tires are disposable wear items. You are supposed to replace them multiple times through the life of the car.
A car model is not faster or better because the OEMs picked a certain tire at a certain trim or offered a different tire at a different trim. This is all equalized when you choose a tire to replace on your car either at end of life or ealier to suit your climate or driving style or whatever.
And tires have a huge impact on performance in every dimension. One of the most dominant aspects of performance is the tire.
This is almost never accounted for in performance testing because volume testing cars while equalizing tires costs a bunch of money, but is expected from owners.
Putting value into ranking cars by some time metric is nonsensical without much better quality testing than you get in car rags and channels.
the C&D Lighting Lap lets manufactures equip optional dealer add-ons like grippy tires. So some cars show up to the track with Cup2 Rs (technically street legal tires, available on some cars as a dealer add-on).
I think that for example, the Supra should be tested with the more modern Pilot Sport 4S or Pilot Sport 5. It’s really traction limited with it’s older Pilot Super Sports.
Devils advocate: a lot of these cars have custom tires developed with the tire manufacturer alongside the development of the car itself. If the manufacturer didn’t supply stickier tires, then thats on them.
More relevant than ever especially with EVs that have very different reproducibility of performance between them.
Considering the driver is a major component on that track, it’s all meaningless unless every test was done by 1 driver.
The Green Hell _ Jackie Stewart ?