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nberry said:
If Gm. Ford, Ferrari, BMW, VW and on and on were catering to motorists who sole criteria is Ring performance certainly they can produce a car to meet their needs. Porsche is single minded in Ring performance. Other car manufacturer look to acceleration and other's to a combination of driving characteristic's. Thus, performance involves goals set by the manfacturer in targeting its market base.
There is a fault in this reasoning, the fact that a car has good ring performance does not mean necesarily that is won't do good in acceleration or other more specific performance aspects. In fact its the opposite of what you are saying. Let me explain:
The beauty of Ring performance is that it combines most of the performance and driving characteristics in one benchmark, or at least it is the best benchmark for global measurement the of the complicated mixture of factors and specs that determine sportcar's performace in real world driving, which is the place were we will later use these production models.
While a drag strip is the best benchmark for acceleration, the ski-pad for lateral G's, the oval for top speed, the kg-scale for the weight, the dyno for the HP, the tight grippy course for sheer handling, ect. the Ring combines all those by-them-self-abstract measurements of performance into one, making it the best predictor for real-world performance of sportcars. Hence focusing on Ring performance is focusing on everything. I think this is the point you fail to grip.
That is why is has become so important for the industry for testing purposes, for sportcar enthusiasts for reference, etc. And why cars that generally do well in the Ring we find ourselves later that do well on the streets performance wise. And there are cars that look great on paper specs but later on the Ring they do not do so well.
Every sportcar enthusiast is or should be very grateful we have the Ring as a source. It has thrown down many myths, brought cars that otherwise wouldn't into the spotlight, its has given us invaluable comparison data between models we like, even between performance options of the same model, pulled the blankets from over manufacture's propaganda and paper specs, etc, etc, etc. If you don't like what you see, don't shoot the messenger, shoot the manufacturer, and if you don't care for what the Ring laps show form a sportcar, then why worry about them?