Porsche has now officially confirmed our concerns about Nissan's *claimed* GTR lap times: http://carsguide.news.com.au/site/motoring-news/story/porsche_accuses_nissan_of_cheating_at_nurburgring/ <A BORDER="0" HREF="http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?displayFAQ=y"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="pitlane/emoticons/wink.gif"></A>
anyone who isnt a fanboy ricer would have figured that out by now... specialy with a mediocre driver like Toshio Suzuki...
I can see Nissan quoting that for advertising: Porsche engineer on the GT-R: "The Nissan is a good car. I don't want to make anything bad with my words," he says. "It's a very consistent car. But this car is about 20 kilos heavier than the Turbo..." And yet we managed to go faster than Porsche round the Ring. Nissan, shift expectations.
This guys comment is correct though "When the R35 GTR first hit the ring and broke 911 Turbo record, it was a wet track, so semi-slick would've be a disastrous choice. The GTR then smashed the record again while test driving the V-Spec model. Porsche, stop criticising the GTR and finds ways of improving!"
Seriously. Also, I think people are getting a bit too sirius with all this #$%#ing N-Ring time bull shit. "911 turb0! GTR! ZR1! OMG! 7 mins blah blah n ring!" Shutup. No one buys a car based solely on Nurburgring lap times and anyone who does is a dense #$%#.
In anything other than standing water, which there was none, the semi-slicks would have been faster than normal tires.
Even if the GTR could do the ring in five minutes dead while picking up my dry cleaning, cooking a great steak and sucking my cock all at once It'd still be a bland, boring looking Japanese box. It probably makes an annoying beeping sound when you hit 100.
They just want to make sure no one is making claims they can't back up. Now its time for Nissan to answer by buying a GT2 and a 911 Turbo and counter.
A normal road tire is better for standing water because it can channel most of the water between the treads and avoid aquaplaning. With a damp track the treading of a normal tire does not get rid of that thin layer of water between the tire and the road. A tire will start to slide when the lateral force becomes greater than the interface between the tire and road can take. So both tires are going to have the loss of traction because the water between the tire is "weaker" than the normal tire to road interface. This that one type of friction that contributes to traction is reduced equally for both types of tires. But this is not the only type of friction that contributes to traction of a tire. Another contribution is from the rubber deforming into all the irregularities of the road surface, think of this as spikes on a shoe. The spikes allow you to walk on slippering surfaces like ice, by locking into the surface. A tire does a similar thing by deforming to lock into the surface irregularities. This form of friction is independent of the thin layer of water. This is also something the semi-slick is much better at doing, due to a soft compound, than a normal road tire. So the semi-slick tires looses less grip than a normal compound in damp conditions. But with standing water they are more likely to aquaplane.
On the 7:38 time it used slick cut tires on a wet track, but on the 7:29 time they used standard jap market tires...so wts Don't officials at the ring need to check out all these things after they set the time for the records to confirm it?