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
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.