LAP TIMES AREN’T EVERYTHING. THE TANGIBLE ASPECTS OF the way a car delivers its performance can’t be measured to the nearest tenth. So why, might you ask, do we regularly put the latest entrants in the world of fast cars against the clock around our favourite circuits and then share the results on evo’s YouTube channel? Well, because lap times do have their place, providing a simple, objective measure of progress and relative performance.
Moreover – and somewhat ironically – the subjective elements of a car tend to crystallise when you strap in, lid on, and leave nothing on the table. Driving on the limit around a circuit is often the only way to reveal those last few elusive layers of a car’s behaviour, what the engineers were thinking, and sometimes what they’ve thought too little about. The machine is laid bare, in other words. If your name is Sutcliffe or Bovingdon, its true potential on track is also realised – admittedly this
