My car is faster than yours around the Nürburgring, yet I don’t know where or what that is …
A trend amongst car manufacturers when releasing a new performance model is to prior leak to the media an astonishingly quick lap time of the northern part of the iconic Nürburgring race track. This encourages a massive collective of car geeks to pour over data points and share on social media these claims, giving vast pre-release publicity to the new model, of which the times are utterly pointless to the buying public.
The inference is that anybody can match the times attained, thus leading to bragging rights which ultimately sells vehicles. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the fact that these times are not independently verified or monitored, such an attempt requires a massive back-up of engineering and technical teams to absorb the data coming from the car’s systems, and to correlate this with feedback from a professional driver who is capable of consistently knocking back lap times within split seconds of each other.
Even weather data is acquired in order to determine the ideal time of day to carry out these attempts, which can number upwards of a hundred laps over a week of testing. Where is the relevance to a normal person living in a country with a 120km/h speed limit? Nowhere. A public-relations exercise to link you to being a professional race driver in a proper race car, a romantic notion that has widespread appeal and guaranteed to pique interest … and it works.
