[Shurenuff]

Originally Posted by IOMZL1

It is a catch-all, very demanding track. It has aspects of most every other track you can find on earth. It does not necessarily favor high horsepower, quick acceleration, good braking, top speed, traction, or good low speed or high speed handling individually - you have to have the entire package to do well. The track is not necessarily smooth so it is challenging in that regard for both car and driver.

Chances are if you do well at the ring, you will do well most anywhere. This does not mean the order of lap times will hold true for any track in the world because some tracks ARE biased to top speed, good acceleration, handling, etc. But a good ring time means you got things right and the car is balanced. Just because a ZR1 beats a GT-R at the ring doesn’t mean it will happen everywhere.

The other thing is that the ring times can’t be taken down to the tenth of a second, even though many cars are very close in their times. We all know that driver, weather, etc. can change lap times. So if the ZL1 beats the GT500 by 2 seconds, for example, I’d call it a wash. The best you could do is have the same driver on the same day run both cars back to back a few times and perhaps average the laps but this will never happen. For this reason, the order can’t really be taken as a rule but more of a guideline. Maybe look at it as ‘tiers’ – Cars under 7:30 = Tier 1, Cars under 7:50 = Tier 2 for example.

So although many US drivers will never take their car to the ring, having a good time there can give confidence to any track they might go to. It is like the ¼ mile statistic in a sense except that road course ‘performance’ is much harder to quantify and the best we can do is go to the (one of if not the) most demanding track on earth as a ‘standard’ of sorts. The ring is simply the most widely accepted standard for measuring road course performance in the world.

What he said