Did Lamborghini cheat and fake its record setting Huracan Performante Nurburgring lap?

[Sticky]

This does not look good. Let's start with the fact that trust in automotive manufacturers is at an all time low. VAG (Volkswagen Auto Group) already showed us they are willing to lie for profit. You can not trust the company to be honest and why would you?

Additionally, the Italians do not seem to be above manipulating circumstances. There certainly are several recent scandals that make it difficult to trust companies especially when it comes to record Nurburgring times.

Lamborghini's recent record claim definitely dropped jaws. We should have known it was too good to be true when the Huracan Performante was making easy work of the Porsche 918 Spyder and the Aventador SV.

How is the Huracan Performante topping those cars and setting a new overall Nurburgring record? It isn't if you believe what JCviggen from northloop.co.uk posted:

I saw some people question this video today, as I'm pretty skeptical generally I went and wasted some time looking at it a few times, occasionally frame by frame.

And I'm pretty sure something fishy is going on, beyond the one-off tires and ECU mapping they may have used, the video itself has some inexplicable things in it when compared to the laps by the Aventador and 918.

Both the Aventador and Huracan appear to be showing GPS speeds, as the Aventador video has the GPS signal drop out for a few moments after Bergwerk (a typical place for that to happen in my experience) and the Huracan has a smaller but clearly visible loss of signal somewhere around Wippermann. Other than that the overlaid speeds seem to correspond with the dashboard almost perfectly though.

It's immediately obvious that the Aventador with its 750 horsepower hits much higher speeds than the Huracan, 297 vs 280 kph towards Sx and 321 vs 299 under the bridge at the end of the lap. This is in line with expectation as it has a lot more power and the relatively modest weight difference is not really in play much at silly high velocities where aero is everything. Minimum corner speeds aren't clearly in favour of the Huracan either. Where did it find all that time?

The only thing left to do was to use some fixed distance markers and calculate the actual speeds the cars were traveling, on average, between these points.

I used the km.4 board right after FP until the km.5 board after the hump towards Sx. At every point did the Aventador show a significantly higher speed - it passed the first board at 209 and hit a 297 high. The Huracan passed the first board at 204 and hit a 280 high. At no point between these boards did the Huracan get near the Aventador's speed. But it crossed the distance more than a tenth of a second quicker, somehow or other. I tried to give the Huracan the biggest possible margin of error with the measurements but it ended up faster than the faster car.

There are only two possibilities: one of the two speed measurements is way off (would be unusual given the evidence that suggests they were both GPS based) or the Huracan video has been sped up. Well that or the Nordschleife has shrunk slightly between these two record attempts.

If the video is sped up (which it appears to be in certain sections and the data below supports), Lamborghini cheated. To make it worse, this was deliberate. How are we supposed to trust manufacturer Nurburgring times? The need for a testing standard is greater than ever.

BoostAddict reached out to Lamborghini for comment. This is going to be difficult to sweep under the rug.

[Aaron]

So tell us again about the tried and true best recipe for road courses.

[blackshan]

Smh! Even more proof that to accomplish these times it takes so much more than just tons of power. From the performance of previous Lamborghini cars, I would never have believed that time as well.

[Sticky]

So tell us again about the tried and true best recipe for road courses.

Just because Lamborghini cheated doesn't mean a lightweight and high revving naturally aspirated car doesn't do well on the roadcourse.

Seriously, this is your point?

[ND75R]

I thought this just wasn't possible, that the cheaper car would somehow dethrone the Aventador SV, but seriously how did they think no one would figure this out? It just doesn't make sense.

[Sticky]

I have no idea why they would just throw their credibility out of the window like that.