What a bunch of cry babies !! The GTR for the dollars kicks about every car on the road apart and they do it with only 3.8 V6....
Q: Are there not a few fully qualified, objective persons (or at least one) who first verifies the overall standards of the car being tested prior to starting the lap? I'm confused as to how semi-racing slicks could have been installed on the GT-R unless there's some palm greasing going on...
Any time a factory tests their cars against someone elses count on the fact that it is biased. Also in this case the driver was not a pro and likely not use to the GTR. The Germans just cant believe or dont want to believe that a ricer can beat them....or at least it appears that way. Porsche is a great car no doubt about it...they dont need to bad mouth Nissan..... "Carrera 4 and Carrera 4S Cabriolet are at either end of the AWD price list, costing $226,500 and $274,600 respectively as manuals and an extra $6600 for the PDK option." Source =http://carsguide.news.com.au/site/research/story/test_drive_porsche_911_2008/
bottom line is they used a non-production car and claimed it was. in my book i couldnt care less, but it is indeed cheating.
No doubt that Porsche will always rock. The Nissan's an incredible value by comparison but I'll never aspire to one day driving a Japanese beer can (lol even if my wife does...).
When I hear Jay Leno say "o.k., I'm emotionally involved" while test driving the GT-R, that means something! LOL
No. There is no standardization nor any baseline set by anyone. The track owner(s) remain neutral and simply cash checks and close the track for factory/OEM/private testing. That's all they do. If the factory guys want to put up 3' pink x-mas trees on The Carousel or put a line of urine at the 6.4829 mile mark, they can. No one checks factory white sheet specs versus the car going onto the track. Well, except for the factory people. Pretty much every factory test at The Ring has involved a professional driver (Chevrolet/ZR1 being the one exception; they used lead engineer Jim Mero). As stated in the linked article, Nissan absolutely used an F1 driver: "...ex-Formula One driver Toshio Suzuki..." Porsche and Dodge also used professional race drivers, Walter Rohrl and Tom Colonel respectively. PLUS, Nissan had the track for WEEKS, as did Chevrolet and Porsche. Dodge was there for half a day.
