Budster:

On the second point, that's great to hear (considering the opposite, most obviously represented by the Lotus F1 car that has zilch, nada, zip to do with Lotus Cars!), and different to Carlos's response: but he's also extremely knowledgable, so I'd be interested in more on this too.  I did think that homologation rules would have made them have to have something   In common...  Perhaps by "nothing in common" is a relative concept Carlos, as the simplest race setup can of course be worth 10 seconds a lap?!  

Right, what I meant by have nothing to do with the RSR is that while they are based on the same, the changes made to the car for racing compared to the street version, from electronic aids to aerodinamics, from tires to the gearbox, etc make it that you cannot derive any information from how one behaves against the competition and apply it to the street version, there have nothing in common in that sense, not to mention that a smooth track and racing enviroment is far from what you would experience in the real world roads performance, as well as the variability in the perfromacne that the fact that all the cars are driven by different drivers. So IMO the results in racing have nothing to do with the performance of the street version compared to the other street version and in the real world.

Your best bet is the comparison of street versions against each other on the same roads, same well versed and experienced driver, and controled enviromental and car specifications (stock cars). The one that gets as close to that as its posible is the Supertest by SportAuto, because it uses the Nurbugring which is a track that best simulates the real world with its surface, and wide variety of corners and straights over an 22 km course, it uses the same driver, Horst Von Saurma who has years of experience in testing all types of sportcars and in the Nurgburgring, and they control the test conditions so they are as similar as posible, and those that they cannot control they messure and mention like enviromental, as well as mentioning if the car had any optional equipment, tires fitted, if the manufacturer cheated and sent a rigged demo car with extra power or altered suspension settings, etc so you can take all those into consideration when putting the results into a comparative context with the tests of the other cars. Still you cannot take those resulst literally since you cannot control all variables but it gives you an gross idea of the car compared to others, at least better than any other I can think of.


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