Why do we not have one yet? German publication Sport Auto did a great 6.58 in the 296, but no SF90 lap yet .... what is the delay?
I don't get this fascination with the Nordschleife. It is objectively a bad metric, as it is so long that many small driver errors can have a huge impact on the overall lap time. Moreover, it is deeply flawed tarmacadam wise. A proper GP track (Monza, Spa, Silverstone etc) is much more representative of a car's performance and allow for repetitive and consistent results.
I don't either. My point was that Porsche is the only one that cares about Ring times. In fact, they build their GT cars to specific Ring times.
'AMG GT Black Series', 'Project One'...... MB seem to care! ... from my experience, cars that have good ring times are better 'drivers cars' than cars that don't!
Oh boy - don't even get me started on the 918 ring time. Love Ring times - when they are legit, great place to show a cars ability.
The Ring is a very important tool for the car industry for road car development due to its unique layout, 154 corners and more than 330 metres (1000 feet) of elevation change, as well as various surfaces and bumps. The track is the most gruelling test of every aspect of a car, from its tyres to complex engineering like transmissions, suspension, aerodynamics and engines, hence why many performance car companies have engineering bases and spend 1000s of hours lapping there each year. I have done various track days in various fast road cars at the Ring, Monza, Spa and Silverstone (among other F1 tracks). I have driven a Pista on them all (and a Speciale and 991.2 GT3 on Sliverstone and Spa and the Ring). Monza, Spa and Silverstone are too smooth and wide for the road cars i have driven on them, they just feel hugely compromised. They made the Pista feel underwhelming , underpowered, underbraked and understeery. The suspension tune is just far to soft and woolie. F1 circuit's in my experience need a dedicated race/track car to get the most out of them. The Nordschleife on the other hand made the Pista feel very extreme, like a wild ride. It also felt over powered. I got Manthey to dial in the alignment and suspension, which really improved it on the Ring but also on the road for me (dialled out understeer mostly, but also improved the steering feel and texture). A-side from safety, their is reasons we will never see F1 or WEC cars racing around the Ring again, its just not suitable for such high performance focused cars any more, but the same reasons makes it ideal for road car development, and a true real world test for them.
Yet, Ferrari and McLaren, two out of the four most important supercar manufacturers (the other two being Lamborghini and Porsche, even though Porsche is not a supercar manufacturer in all honesty; more like a sportscar/SUV maker), don't bother with the Nordschleife. Unless you are saying that Ferrari and McLaren don't know what they are doing... For me, the Nordschleife is just a German marketing tool (Lamborghini being German owned suffers the same fate now). I have driven some of those F1/GP tracks myself, I liked the fact that the results were repeatable. As you say, they expose a car's shortcomings more evidently than the Ring. That's why they represent a stricter standard, IMHO.
McLaren waaay overrated .... if they "McLaren, two out of the four most important supercar manufacturers" are so important, why no good ring times for Senna, 765LT, P1 .... because they have waaay too much understeer .... and are unreliable! We looked at a Senna with a full cf body and the quality was awful, the drivers door kept jamming and struggled to open / close, when the car was idling, switch gear fell out of their location and were hanging by a wire!
No dog in this fight, but my biggest gripe with Ring times is the enormous impact that resurfacing has had over the years (plus the ever-improving tire compounds being used). It makes it nearly impossible to compare cars over time. Cars that are fast on the Ring are likely to be better road cars, but the actual time itself is much less meaningful.
You are very very wrong. Ferrari test a lot at the Ring. As do you Lambo and Mclaren, Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login https://www.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2017/05/Lamborghini-Urus-prototype-testing-on-track-01.jpg Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login https://www.motortrend.com/uploads/f/33196290.jpg Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I agree with that. But every metric changes with time. Every car set up is a compromise. No setup will work in every situation . But from experience, if you can get a high performance car to work confidently at the Ring without going to extremes, it will work well in the real world as well. Drive any GT Porsche and you will experience this. The same can't be said for road cars being set up for F1 tracks, they have almost zero relevance to real world driving.
The Ring is important for development. Not as a metric for how good, or fast, a car is. Using the Ring as a development metric is one thing; using it as a quality metric is quite another. Don't conflate the two. They are not the same.
We have an exposed carbon Senna. It has none of those things. It’s been very reliable so far and seems well enough built. I would say not quite as nice on the surface as LaF but not far off. Certainly no switches falling off.
The ring is a mixed blessing. It is a good place to develop a car and find out how it will respond under high performance road conditions. But it does not produce a car that is good in all conditions, nor does it necessarily produce a car that is fun to drive. It helps to deliver a car that can be driven quickly on the road. It is not the ring per se that does this, the ring just happens to be the only unrestricted and highly varied road that is set up to do development. But let’s not pretend that Porsche GT products (and I love them) are suitable for all conditions. They are terrible on some of the roads near me, being too stiff. A lotus is much better, though I don’t really like them for other reasons. There are cars that are good to drive that don’t go so well on the ring in terms of lap time and vice versa. For example, a Pista is slower than a 992 GT3 on the ring, yet it has a much better suspension set up for general road use. I remember James May argued that pursuit of lap time on the ring was, in fact, the enemy of building fun to drive cars. This has some logic attached to it. Fun to drive does not always equate to speed. Therefore if you pursue speed, this can be achieved without having had to concentrate on building a fun car. Porsche are now trapped - every iteration of the GT3 has to be faster than the last around the ring.
There is so much truth in this. And some of the (allegedly) most "fun" cars to drive will never ever see a lap around the Ring, much less set a "Ring time" in stock production form. GMA T.50 and T.33 Any Singer 911 Dakar Huracan Sterrato
My point exactly. Plus manufacturers test on many different locations, the Ring is just one of them. For Ferrari, Fiorano is a much more valuable tool.
It's only valuable to Ferrari because they own it and its on the doorstep of the factory. Fiorino is a basic Mickey Mouse track. If Ferrari could have the choice of having Fiorano or the Nurbergring a few miles from their factory gates, they would not be choosing Fiorano. Their is good reasons Ferrari also own Mugello and use it for testing and development.
