2013 Car and Driver Lightning Lap

Originally Posted by Red__Zed

OK, I will bite, but only because I'm bored without my ZdayZ fix.

Not only have you made this statement no less than four times without providing a source, the lap time deltas are comparable to a number of other tests. Whether the car was abused any differently than any other car in the test (because let's face it, none of these cars were being babied)is subject to debate, but there's certainly been no admission of such from C&D--which means it is all speculative.

I'll save you the 8 second google search and provide the post-mortem here:

Z Meets Wall: We Investigate Why the NISMO Z's Brakes Failed at Lightning Lap - Feature - Car and Driver

Verdict? Lack of air on the brakes--nothing new to anyone who's familiar with the Z. Nothing about the car having been abused. There's also no mention of the car having felt wrong, as you seem to indicate. You can also scope the original article and find the same thing rings true (although you might contend that the below description of the car indicates something was wrong)

Lightning Lap 2009 - Car Comparison - Feature Article - Page 8




Now, back to the point I was making earlier, let's compare the Z's performance at VIR against another mag test.

Lightning lap:

Mustang GT 3:08.6
370Z : 3:12.00
EXO MR : 3:13.3
Mini Cooper John Cooper Works : 3:17.1
Volkswagen GTI : 3:19.3
Miata 3:29.3

Now, let's take a look at another test--this one with a fresh Z:



The Z still slots in right where you'd expect given the course change and such. You can't make this sort of stuff up! And, since I know that sometimes it is hard to compare numbers, here are the scaled track times, in visual format:



Blue dots are LL, red dots are scaled Grattan times.

My takeaway from these results is that if anyone was going to complain about their car's performance at LL, it should be the poor guys in Miatas...

So, I'm not convinced there is any evidence supporting the claim that the 370Z in the LL test was some sort of oddity--if you have any, I would love to see it.