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Originally Posted by Billup
You can start taking down weight, reducing power, yada yada yada, but then you are just making two equal cars go head to head, where's the realism behind that? The tables would be turned because its an unrealistic comparison.
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But that's racing. There are weight restrictions, horsepower restrictions, dimensional restrictions, tire restrictions, aero restrictions... Racing is not "reality" in that sense.
However, AWD certainly has a weight penalty in street cars, and that certainly shows up often in street car performance... I wonder how a 991 S and 991 4S would compare head-to-head on the same track on the same day with the same driver. Porsche says there's only a 111 lbs difference. It's the best sort of "all else equal" test. I suspect a novice like me would be faster in the 4S, while a more experienced driver like Randy Pobst could get to the edge of the performance envelope of the S just as easily as the 4S, and the weight advantage of the S would be the deciding factor.
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Nissan builds an AWD system through testing thinking it can compete with the Vetter or Viper, and it failed to deliver, plain and simple.
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IIRC, when it was released in 2007 the GTR was faster than it's RWD Corvette and Viper competition around the Nurburgring. Not what I'd call a failure to deliver. But there's still a bit of an arms race among some vehicle manufacturers - MT's article about the Viper GTS Time Attack notes how SRT president Ralph Gilles was pissed about a test showing a Corvette ZR1 as faster than a Viper GTS, and the TA version was a direct result of that - so it's not surprising to me we're seeing Chevy and Chrysler with the faster cars. Nissan is continuing to tweak the GTR, but it's not clear how much attention they're paying to those cars.