You may or may not know, or for that matter care, but Nissan and Porsche are at each other’s throats at the moment about how fast (or otherwise) the new GT-R can lap the Nurburgring.
To recap, Nissan claimed the GT-R had set a time of 7min 29 secs. Then a few months later Porsche accused Nissan of – not putting too fine a point on it – cheating, using a ‘bent’ car to set the time.
Next, Nissan put out a press release offering to teach Porsche’s development drivers how to drive, and now Nissan has released an ‘official’ video showing the lap, which also happens to show the standard tyres that were used to set the time.
All of which, you’d think, has put the matter to rest.
Erm, no. In fact I think that Nissan might have made a bit of a howler this time, because I’ve just watched the vid and noticed that the GT-R seems to have missed a whole chunk of straight out of the timed lap.
Watch the footage closely and you’ll see that the clock starts just before the first left hander of the lap, and yet it stops just as the driver is coming out of the final right hander. In between the two there is a good 300 yards of straight, none of which is included in the lap time.
Unfortunately this means Nissan has got its sums wrong to the tune of at least six seconds, maybe more, and put the whole thing on film on the internet.
Which means the vid that's supposed to prove Nissan’s point once and for all is, erm, not very good at proving anything – other than that a GT-R looks very sorted around the Nurburgring, and obviously very fast.
But not quite as fast as Nissan claims…