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
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.