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
Eh trying to say Nurburgring times are useless is just as circlejerky as treating them as gospel.
Ring times are a rough measure of relative track performance. To be useful, one has to consider the context of the lap time(s) like the driver, tires, whether it was a factory effort, and whether that manufacturer is prone to cheating.
So if a car is with 5-7 seconds a lap of a comparable car, generally they’re in the same ballpark, unless there’s something out of whack with the lap times, like one car on a vastly superior tire.