Spyderidol:
Ferdie:

If the car is quicker over one lap and a complete stint, the main flaw must be its reliability. The RSR has won the 24h at Nürburgring, this year with a significant pace to go against the Audi R8 racecars.

The RSR is not quicker over one stint. It begins to loose it's advantage as soon as the rear tires begin to ware (75% through the stint)

Also - The RSR that raced at the 24h Nurburgring was heavily restricted. Engine was not putting out anywhere near it's max.

I watched an interview with Pierre Kaffer, winner of the GT2 category in the Risi-Ferrari, and he stated that Porsche made significant improvements over the winter on the RSRs.

The Nürburgring car was only restricted this year, in the previous years none of them suffered an engine failure.

All in all, could it be that some of you might be a bit too pessimistic about Porsche´s current state of performance? I agree that the performance of the RSRs was nowhere near as good as in previous years but so was the performance of the Audi R15s. The later were newly developed for this season, with no technical restrictions but they still lost and made some uncommon mistakes. The 997 RSR, when it debuted, was inferior to the F430 as well and I simply don´t buy the reason that it is due to its rear-engined layout...