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
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More relevant than ever especially with EVs that have very different reproducibility of performance between them.
A better stat for testing and marketing is: how many laps can a car complete from the factory before something breaks?
The only Nürburgring times that matter are your own personal times.
Matters for some certain groups of cars. Like the AMG GT-R or the Porsche 911 GT3RS that are purpose built track monsters. They’re directly competing for title of fastest road going track car and the ring is the best place to test it, since it’s over 20 kilometers long and has so many corners, so even small shades of difference will show up and differences of several seconds over the entire course. Is it relevant for the new M3 that is now a comfortable cruiser with a powerful engine and many creature comforts? Nope. But it’s important for the Aventador SVJ since they were batting for the throne as well. Honda and Renault have been battling it out as well for fastest production FWD car. It’s not exactly a metric that consumers can directly make use of, but it’s the proving grounds for those who wish to buy their cars based of pure track performance.
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.
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.
for some cars, I still think it’s a good measurement
that said, you can really only compare similar cars.
“Bomb the Nürburgring” - James May
I’d say a they’re one of the most meaningless stats for the average driver. Most people drive stoplight to stoplight or on relatively straight roads
Even as a measure of a car’s true real world performance they seem to be tainted
Depends on what your goal is.
If you wanna compare specific cars on how they perform on twisty backroads, it may have some use. Ofc you’ll never reach the cars true potential, but it could give some information on how useable the power is.
Usable power is the most important factor in this day and age with every other car demonstrating insane power figures
Not meaningless, but not incredibly useful.
Nurburgring is one of the most downforce rewarding tracks in the world. A lot of the track is around 120 mph or more in a fast car and those fast parts are filled with hill crests and long sweepers. Basically made for aero. If you look at the top road cars lap times, they all have great downforce.
For a road car, even one you bring to the track, aero wont matter nearly as much. Maybe an exception is on say highly illegal backroad excursions, but blasting down back roads at 130 mph is just not something people do much.
I think the best track benchmark we have is C&D’s lightning laps at VIR. That track is just better to compare with for real world performance than Nurburgring. Plus there are more controls in place so no marketing silliness.
With Porsche getting home cooking advantage its always been irrelevant. Probably why Ferrari, Mclaren havent made any attempts.
I have the same opinion on the Nürburgring like James May. Nürburgring lap times make no sense…
Bomb it!
Cars set up to perform well in one specific test don’t match up when driven on the roads the average driver takes every day?
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60-130 is the only one that matters IRL for drag racing. Anything below 60 is up to transmission type and gearing, beyond is where power shows and gearing doesn’t matter as much
Drag racing is highly focused on the balance between power and traction. A car with 1500hp and slicks that can barely hook at 50 may put up a low 3s 60-130, but won’t 60’ for shit. Look at the Model S Plaid. It can run a fantastic time for a street car, but doesn’t have enough weight transfer to run 8s, despite having the power.
As for gearing, look at any 10R80/10L90 car. 1st is useless if you have more than 400hp, regardless of rear gear.
I don’t think you’ve been in a 10R80 1st goes to like 50, more like ZF8 is useless 1st gear I launch 2nd.
But that was my whole thing, most drags are in the street doing rolls, so 60-130 matters a lot more
Brother, I own two of em. First tops out at 42 in my Mustang at 7.5k with a 3.15 with a big tire. My F150 barely kisses 30.
Tell me again how smart you think you are lol
I know better cause my car is actually fast, not some NA Mustang on a drag pack 😂
Roll racing is still drag racing, just a subset of it
You are definitely one of those guys haha. Tell me buddy, how deep in the 9s are you on your downpipe and intake with a tune you had to have someone else make? Or since you apparently don’t know how to launch, how deep in the 3s are you for a 60-130?
yup, came to say the same thing. I was going to post "James May was right about this, the desire manufacturers have to produce faster lap times has ended up giving us worse sports cars. "
When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Yeah captain slow would say something like that. You’re just afraid of SPEED and POWERRRRR
“Just another pointless track-oriented racing car”
That’s what I mean. People in these comments are saying it’s a good way to see how cars would act on real roads, but I don’t think so at all. If you can’t rely on times to be honest and fair for all cars, how could you begin to compare times at all?
Always have been.
Sure, but it’s still fun as hell to drive.
No argument there, but I think OP was talking about benchmark testing by car manufacturers.
Exactly. It’s a marketing gimmick and it has 0 relevance for end consumers in the real world. Similarly, 0-60 times are also irrelevant for real world driving.
You can add the German autobahn no speed limit showcases to that too…
Yep. 5 to 60 is more relevant for real world driving. At least for daily driving.
NJ and its ultra short freeway merges say that 0-60 is the all important number, at least for those of us living somewhere with bad highway designs.
😂 merging onto 295 was always a good time in my lighting on 315 radials, except the one time there was snow on the ground… that was sketchy.
Nope. It’s still 5 to 60 that’s more relevant unless you’re doing a 5k clutch dump with flat shifting or using launch mode.
Merging onto 1&9 off of 35 in Woodbridge and having to immediately cut across 2 lanes to make it to route 9 taught me how important that 0-60 really is
None of these times are relevant for real world driving. My car needs 17 seconds from 0 to 60 (more in the eco mode I’m always using) and it’s always fast enough to keep up with traffic.
or 0 to 30. that’s where most people notice slow acceleration.
I’d say 0-40 is a good metric. Basically how long does it take to hit cruising speed.
0-30 and close to weight capacity. I bought my Rav4 as a work vehicle, and you would be amazed at how much difference not having 400-500 lbs of tools/parts in the back makes.
You don’t want to start at a moving speed as it creates other variables to take into consideration that will affect the time. Starting at 0 will give the most consistent start each time and give replicable results for others.
Nope. You can get consistent times from 5 mph starts. Of course it creates other variables, but it’s more representative of daily driving since a lot of people will regularly floor their car.
But they’re not using launch mode or dumping the clutch from 5k rpm which is what you get when you do 0 to 60 times.
Especially in the world of launch control where the turbos pre spool
Well, I would dare saying that 0-60 matters in one weird spot, in merging into high speed traffic when standing still, something very common in NYC highways.
But yes, it’s meaningless otherwise.
The 0-60 is important to GR Corolla Morizo owners so they can flex that it’s just as fast as a dark horse.
0-60 is just to make AWD and launch control equipped cars look way better than they are in the real world
Don’t tell the STI guys that their 5-60 is slower than a Golf GTI and a GR86
STi is somewhere around 7 seconds 5-60, I feel like the new Prius might be faster 😬
If the race goes to just 60 I don’t even think the Prius has to be new to win lol
0 to 60 is important if you merge on hiways and interstates.
you merge onto a highway from a standstill?
Surely you mean 30-80 is the speed you’ll be going when merging
When turning left from a stoplight.
Most on-ramps in bigger California cities have metering lights. You have to accelerate in a pretty short distance often.
The ones onto the 405 in OC are fucking terrible. I have to give it like 75% throttle to merge safely even in pretty quick cars. I swear at least half the reason there are so many Teslas here is due to the fact that the average OC commute has like 4 drag races in it.
Each way has one on the on-ramp and another just to get into the lane for that on-ramp
Around here it’s 30-50 on the onramp and just rip in front of people doing 15-20 below the posted speed limit…
Not to mention, I think James May is/was right. Every time cars are “developed” on tracks they’re always painful in real life. Only caveat is cars with adaptive suspension can be good in comfort mode.
I wouldn’t say irrelevant, but not as important as the focus on it. 5-60 or even 5-40 are more helpful but since they’re not used no one knows what a reasonable time is.
“0-60 times used to be relevant when the cars I liked did good times but now that EVs are here they are irrelevant.”
-Car enthusiasts
It’s a good stat for a 911 GT3 RS, it’s a useless stat for a BMW X5 30d.
Maybe you want to take the entire family around the ring?
Big Pete 💪💪💪
Carries 7 lads 'round the ring in no time atall
There was a great ad in the 90s about the Minneapolis bus beating a Porsche from the city to the suburbs. All because traffic and bus lanes.
If we’re very very honest, it doesn’t really matter for the GT3RS either. Yes it’s cool to see how fast Porsche and others can make their cars go, but a super tiny amount of buyers will actually push these cars and an even tinier fraction will be able to drive them to their limit. The majority of people who seriously “care” about these stats are kids and keyboard warriors, both of which mostly have very little acutal knowledge about cars. I’d take an E92M3 GTS over an M4GTS any day of the week, even though the M4 is faster around the ring. To me, there’s a lot more to a car than lap times and power.
Meh, 0-60 tines are definitely relevant, so long as each car is tested without shit like rollout and torque braking and prepped surfaces etc.
Every car should be tested in a controlled environment at sea level on the same surface under the same conditions.
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James May has always insisted cars made for fast nurburgring times are inherently bad cars for anything else.
Don’t know the specifics of what he’s insisted, but it’s kind of a bad take, the curves/undulations/cambered or off camber turns of Nurburgring are what make it special, closer to a real life mountain road type surface instead of a flat track. Wouldn’t that make cars better for real world performance?
May’s argument is if you’re going to make a track car, make a track car. If you’re going to make a road car, make a road car.
Don’t make a road car intended to be driven at track speeds. The Nurburgring is special because its unique, should be a use case for car design.
Absolutely,
Track cars are generally miserable to drive as a daily driver. Road cars are always fun.
Theoretically maybe, but there are so few ‘normal’ roads where you can actually drive anywhere near as fast as the ring that it’s pointless.
It’s like testing your car at 200mph on the Autobahn. Yes it will lead to a better experience for brave Germans in clear weather. But the compromises you made will make it a worse car for every other buyer round the planet.
Go ahead and look up the cobalt ss ring times. So much butthurt after that was recorded
That one, and the HHR SS.
Such a cheap fun little car.