Benchracing

Even the same driver won't necessarily be a proper benchmark. Conditions on different days obviously make a big difference, and some cars might suit a particular driver better than others. Two cars with similar performance might go different ways depending on who's driving them.

Car companies that bother to hire drivers to race their cars hire great ones, as a rule of thumb. Two drivers driving the same car on the same track in identical conditions will generally post times within a second or two of each other.

The driver is so important, especially in series like F1 and Nascar where there are so many regulations limiting cars that they're all pretty similar.

Motortrend's Randy Probst isn't "the best" but he's very good. More importantly he is EXTREMELY consistent. It's about eliminating the driver/human factor from the comparison which is really hard and they do a good job of it.

I agree

I'll just leave this here
youtu.be/tQ3x462rlmg

that guy is my hero

Fuck off pussy

I agree

randy pubes heavily favors some types of cars over others and has stated that his opinions about the car affects his driving
he is gms little toy

Me too

Considering he spent years racing Porsches and Mazdas, i dont think you know what youre talking about.

Yea same

until you're able to extract 100% of the car's performance, you're likely to post similar times in two wildly dissimilar cars. lots of fast drivers are specialists as well, and will do better with certain cars, conditions, or tracks, and are faster or slower learners. when i go to a track i can click off pretty quick speeds (for me, not compared to fast guys) in the first few sessions, but then i hit a flat spot that requires a lot of work to improve. other guys start slow and ramp up quickly when it all comes together for them. everyone runs out of time and goes away from the track thinking they could have had a better lap if they could have worked on a few things, so they might have missed a good chunk of time somewhere.

nothing amplifies these varying factors more than nurburgring times. if you can find raw data from a manufacturer's test that shows all the laptimes over the course of a day, you might be very surprised and disillusioned by how inconsistent they are. thats why, at a super long track like the snaefell, its more instructive to look at average speed. on a track that long its easy to lose 10-20 seconds on someone even though you only give up 1 mph on average, and they only inch ahead a couple yards per corner.

also, sebastian loeb's utter decimation of the 2013 PPIHC shows how tenuous these 'ultimate lap records' are. someone a little better with specialist experience could come along one day and wreck everyone's shit by a large margin. you might be able to credit the car he was in, but considering the budget and tech level already present with yearly PP contenders, i doubt it.

I like when the compare the journalists times to Randy's like the did in the GT Vs M3 comparo.

hey Trollfucker, /osg/ has been looking for you

Me too

He hated the GT-R so much, he drove one right off a cliff.

There's also the part where that was the first year that the road was fully paved all the way up. Rod Millen set a record there on dirt that stood for over a decade.

A lot honestly

This

who is this serious looking autist?

Randy Pobst, Motortrend test driver, successful race driver, Laguna Seca specialist, and meme machine responsible for pic related and other sources of Veeky Forums butthurt.

he sounds pretty gay. is he gay?

You'd think a thread on a subforum where the vast majority of posters only ever drive in videogames would be more active...

we don't know shit about the real world