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
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.
Or why track tests in the Golf R are usually done in Comfort mode and not Race mode.
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
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.