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Now, I just can’t let this newsbit pass since it’s about one of my favorite cars as of late - Godzilla with four wheels - the Nissan GT-R. And it’s getting some flak from Porsche with the German automaker claiming that Nissan cheated when they set the GT-R’s then-record-breaking lap time around the Nurburgring.
Porsche engineers have been running tests with the 911 around the ‘Ring and claim that they couldn’t get within 25 seconds of the GT-R’s 7:29 lap time. For them, that kind of time is impossible if it was a regular production car and that Nissan probably used a different set of tires.
Well, let’s get the facts straight. Porsche purchased a US-spec Nissan GT-R and raced them against the standard GT2 and a 911 Turbo. At the hands of Walter Rohrl one of their engineers, the Porsche cars beat the living hell out of the Japanese supercar.
Maybe, the GT-R is really just built for the Japanese. They set the lap time with ex-F1 Toshio Suzuki behind the wheel. Or maybe the GT-R just hates German drivers. But come on, in the hands of the Stig, the Porsche 911 Turbo clocked in 1.31.0 around the Top Gear test track and the GT-R clocked in at 1.19.7.
Then again, this just builds up the controversy whether Nissan was really tuning their test cars for better performance over the production ones.
Oct 02
Porsche Cars, Products and LifeStyle Said,
October 2, 2008 @ 6:17 pm
Actually, the laps were not run by Rohrl. Rather, it was one of their “chassis engineers who is an expert on the Nurburgring.”
My biggest issue with this is not the controversy, but rather that fact that Porsche acknowledged it in the first place. Why add fuel to a fire that was almost burned out?
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