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
No measure is meaningless. You just need to understand what it represents, and put it in context with other measures.
Would you date someone based upon a single measure alone?
I think what is really needed, are notes beside each time by an unbiased observer or official. They need to note track conditions, weather, car modifications, tires, driver, etc then we would be able to take data from each time and draw some conclusions. I know with some runs this data is available but most places just report the cars and the times.