Confirming the initial rumors, Lamborghini went on and released an onboard lap video of their upcoming Huracan Performante at the Nurburgring, completing the process in a record-breaking 6:52.01, beating the previous record set by the much more powerful Porsche 918 Spyder by 5 whole seconds.
It didn’t take long for some reactions to question Lamborghini’s achievement, accusing them from speeding up the video framerate to just plainly faking the whole damn thing.
But here’s the thing: Nurburgring lap times, as they stand, can never be proven fake, even if they are; first, there is no official governing body overlooking the manufacturers trying to set a lap time and secondly, even if there was ever such a thing, we still are left with one major issue concerning the conditions and the state of this massive track at the time of the lap attempt.
Among the most popular critics of Lamborghini’s lap was Dale Lomas of Bridge to Gantry, who thinks that there’s something off with Lamborghini’s lap in his blog post after examining the digital speedo readouts of the lap videos in both the Aventador SV and the Huracan Performante.
As Lomas points out, both of these readouts are fed from GPS rather than the wheel speed and they have been added to the video during the post-production process. GPS is known to be miles more accurate than an onboard gauge, but its signal strength depends on things like trees, ground reflections and more, which logically explains the readout glitches displayed in both videos.
Misha Charoudin. on the other hand. compared the Huracan Performante’s record lap with the one posted from the Porsche 918 Spyder, even creating an excel sheet comparing specific high and low speeds as taken from the cars’ speedos shown in the respective videos. In that excel sheet, Charoudin found that the Porsche was traveling faster than the Lambo in the majority of the track’s length, leading many to believe that the ltalian supercar maker was caught cheating.
MISHA CHAROUDIN
Only this isn’t true as the data used for backing up the fake lap theory is simply worthless. Picking up entry, exit or straight-line speeds which are measured in different ways, in different track conditions, from two separate videos is never going to form a solid basis for comparison, to say the least.
Add to that the fact that these videos are usually edited in the post-production process to add things like the nice digital speedometer in Lamborghini’s case or that the lap footage Porsche released for the 918 is actually three seconds slower than its record time.
One Lap Heroes pointed out at this with a video response, explaining that you can’t cherry pick speed readouts from an edited video, just because it fits a certain narrative. When it comes to analyzing how a car is faster or slower than another one, you need both cars wearing ideally the same tires and the full telemetry of both laps, measured by the same instrument on the same day and only then you can draw a useful verdict.
One Lap Heroes
As for the accusation of Lamborghini speeding up the video, well it appears that this theory is also debunked after Racelogic, the maker of the perhaps the world’s most respected measuring equipment, posted a lengthy geeky analysis of the lap on their Facebook page and despite Lamborghini not using their systems to time the Huracan Performante.
We all know that Nurburgring lap times are just a marketing tool used cleverly by the manufacturers and every clear-headed petrolhead should always approach the matter with more than just a pinch of salt. There’s no need for drama in this, especially because there is no official control on the lap times published from time to time.
On top of all that, we simply can’t believe that Lamborghini would risk its huge reputation over a Nurburgring lap record, it just doesn’t make sense as Chris Harris also tweeted.
I’ve had my beef with @Lamborghini , but I just cannot believe that they’d post a dodgy ‘Ring time for the Superperformante.— chris harris (@harrismonkey) March 3, 2017
The new Lamborghini Huracan Performante will be revealed at the Geneva Motor Show tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll get all the details of that ‘Ring record soon. Who knows, perhaps the best explanation of why the new Lambo is so incredibly fast around the Nurburgring is given in the video linked below.