When Lamborghini announced that the Huracan Performante had lapped the Nurburgring in an astonishing 6 min 52 sec last week, a few questions were raised about how it could be so much faster than the Porsche 918 Spyder.
Now, a number of Nurburgring experts, including those from Ringfreaks, Bridge to Gantry and Misha Charoudin, better known as Boosted Boris, have called into question the lap time and suggest that the time may have been faked by the Italian marque.
In a theory from Bridge to Gantry, the author suggests that based on onboard footage of the Performante’s lap as well as its bigger sibling, the Aventador SV, it is the Aventador that had a higher average speed around the circuit to achieve its 6 min 59 sec lap time. With this in mind, it is suggested that Lamborghini may have sped up the frame rate of the video by approximately 5 per cent.
Ringfreaks have managed to take dozens of screenshots from the onboard videos of the Performante’s lap time and the 918 Spyder’s record-setting 6 min 57 sec. They show that through most sections of the track, the 918 is able to hold more speed through high and mid-speed corners while also be just as fast as the Performante around the track’s slowest corners. The German hypercar is also faster along most straights than the Lamborghini, excluding the track’s main straight where the Porsche famously ran out of hybrid power during its record-setting lap in this section.
Boosted Boris has expanded on this by creating an extensive Excel spreadsheet which shows that the 918 was faster in 42 sections/corners of the track, slower in 21 and equal in 20 areas.
Now, as convincing as some of these arguments are, it is by no means definitive proof that Lamborghini faked its lap record. In fact, there’s a possibility that the data recorder used by Lamborghini was simply not as accurate as the Vbox that Porsche used and that the speeds displayed in the video are not correct.
We are unlikely to find out for sure if the Huracan Performante is capable of such an incredible time until Sport Auto gets the chance to test it at the Nurburgring. In the meantime, it’ll continue to sit on top of the production car record list.