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
It’s an incredibly long, fast and complex track. And it’s not in California so grip levels vastly change during the year.
Some cars are just not fit for it because it’s full of fast corners so engine power, aero load and tyre grip are more important than in classic shorter tracks. It’s pretty fit for most german cars actually since they love big engines and big tires.
Add to that the fact that’s it’s very famous and you have some brands focusing hard on setting a good Nurb time for marketing and bragging rights with all the preparation and budget that comes with it.
So yeah mostly meaningless, still useful as a good pointer regarding a car’s performance on fast corners tracks.
Also the super hard Nordschleife inspired suspension basically always make the cars slower on the nordschleife. Its one of the reason why the Skoda Octavia vRS for example is faster round the nordschleife than the same engined VW Golf GTI because the golfs suspension is way to hard and nervous for the ring.
I dont get this. Isnt the Nordschleife and Nürburgring the same thing?
Nürburgring is usually the GP layout.
Nurburgring is the whole complex, with the Nurburgring Nordschleife being the big loop through the mountains, and the Nurburgring GP circuit being, well, the GP circuit
Or why track tests in the Golf R are usually done in Comfort mode and not Race mode.
This confused me, maybe I’m just misinformed but thought suspension made for use on nordschleife was softer in a sense because of how many hard bumps and undulations it had to deal with at speed. It wasn’t harsh harsh damping, which usually ended up negatively affecting a cars performance there. Correct me if I’m incorrect or mislead in a sense.
Totally off topic but I’m super jealous of your A110. Wish they sold them here in the States.
Thanks mate, it’s pretty fun ! Can’t be sold in the US for some safety regulations reason iirc, but I think they’ll sell the EV replacement in the future. Some A110s were spotted on US roads in the last months.
They brought some A110 Rs over here as press cars, that’s probably the ones that were seen around. Also I think it would be very stupid of them to try and break into the US market with an EV, the only Americans who know about Alpine are enthusiasts and we don’t want EVs we want a lightweight internal combustion A110.
Yup that’s a hard task to sell an EV sportcar in the States lol