Tesla Model 3 Performance with Track Mode Beats a Ferrari's Record

Agreed, the times are rendered uncomparable since they changed the tires - increasing both size and stickiness!

It's bogus.

> How do we know the track mode upgrades made the car faster

Just the testament of the driver.

Not only did they upgrade the original tires to track-oriented, barely street legal tires but also they upgraded to track-oriented brakes. Both of these have very large effects on track times. Adjusting handling characteristics to the preferences of the same driver who then sets the lap times is somewhat of a cheat too.

The link to is a blog spam article that makes is it appear as if the Tesla was faster than a current Ferrari model but in reality, it was an 8-year old model. I don't see a lap time for the Ferrari 488 but the Lamborghini Huracan Performante was much faster: 1:18.73 vs 1:21.49 with Randy Probst. The 2018 Nissan GT-R Nismo was also faster. (https://fastestlaps.com/tracks/willow-springs-streets-of-wil...)

The biggest problem is not mentioned at all - the Tesla can do only about 4 laps (4-5 estimated here https://www.motortrend.com/cars/alfa-romeo/giulia/2019/tesla... but the track tires limit the range further).

From this article https://www.motortrend.com/cars/tesla/model-3/2019/tesla-mod..., linked elsewhere in the thread, it seems as if the jaguar was using track tires while the Tesla came in with standard equipment the first time. Upgrading the Tesla's brakes and tires seems like it was done to bring it into line with what other cars were using.

Randy Pobst's car collection is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8teV5nuEEI

I love his motor trend track reviews. Definitely a badass.

Doesn't matter. You think the people who buy Ferraris race them around the track? Most of them sit in garages and get driven to the golf club.

But with Tesla, you can now own a car that's "faster than a Ferrari" for less than $100k. Kids aren't dreaming of owning Ferraris now, they're dreaming of owning Teslas.

Most gasoline cars will get pretty low on gas with a full day on the track. I track and usually end up topping up some after lunch. Most tracks have gas there, and charge like $6-8/gal.

Often with Tesla, year people leave at lunch to go to the nearest supercharger. If tracks added some fast DC chargers, it would be a nice boost.

The cooling down time is usually only 15 minutes though, especially if you can plug into power and use the active cooling at full blast (would require software modification).

I've seen three Model 3's at the track at this point - none of them modified. They appear to run just fine without overheating their batteries. The biggest issue is in the brakes. The Model 3 is a heavy, powerful car which has insufficient rotor surface area to dissipate the large amounts of braking heat generated. Of the three that I'm familiar with, all three ended their track day early because of brake pads crumbling due to excessive heat. Better pads would last a lot longer, but there's still not enough rotor for the size and weight. This Performance Tesla had better have a bigger brake setup.

The range on track isn't as awful as I thought. It seems to use charge at about 4x the indicated rate (100 mi range remaining indicated means about 25 miles actual range left), so the 300mi version of that car is good for about 75 track miles. Not bad at all, compared to a tank of gas in a sporty car.

It seems that they use all tricks available, including cooling the engines and batteries.

It's impressive nevertheless.

They tuned it to the preference of a professional driver, who has also driven probably every sporty car made in the past decade on that track. So it's not like his preferences are arbitrary, they are the result of a huge amount of experience. And clearly his expertise is paying off, as the lap times have improved considerably.

I also don't think that preference is the right word to use. Cars have unique characteristics which need to be leveraged differently to maximize performance. A Mustang GT, a 911 Turbo S, and a Audi TT-RS are going to have different handling characteristics by virtue of their design.

Since the Model3 is so unique, adapting characteristics of, say, a BMW M3 or an Audi RS3 to a Model3 might not yield the best results. Which is probably what the original engineers did.

In reality, every car maker does this.

Ferrari and Lamborghini has test drivers, usually pro racing car drivers that went into private practice or on commission during their off seasons, and they tune the cars to what the test drivers want.

There is no other way to do it. Do you imagine that there's a non-human standard that car makers calibrate to? These cars are meant to be driven by humans, so they tune it to fit one, or a small team of test drivers. There's literally no other way to do it. You take the car out on the road, and get the test driver to talk to the engineers, and they tune it, one small bit at a time, until you get the feel and times that the company is shooting for.

The fact that Tesla has started realizing this means the company is maturing.

Race drivers have extremely fine senses for how the car is handling, and what makes it handle. While there is a degree of preference for the most part engineers use professional drivers as more of a highly refined sensor to tell them how to make the car corner faster and accelerate quicker.

There's a famous anecdote by Indy champion Rick Mears[1] who could correct the car's 'stagger', the (small) air pressure difference in each tire, just by driving it in precisely the right way to heat up a single tire by a few degrees.

TLDR; drivers are precision instrumentation coupled with deep domain knowledge.

[1] https://949racing.com/using-a-tire-pyrometer-949-Racing.aspx

It's an extra mode, you have to manually change to it.

Alfa makes a full range of vehicles, including performance cars

> Perhaps more remarkable was that the Model 3 Performance’s new record in the Willow Springs Streets actually ended up beating one of Motor Trend‘s Best Driver’s Car winners in the past — the 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia, which completed the course in 1:22.30.

This is the (last gen) 458: http://www.mansory.com/files/media/mansory/sliders/ferrari-4...

And this is Ferrari's current mid-engine car, the 488: https://file.kbb.com/kbb/vehicleimage/housenew/480x360/2016/...

I'm impressed that the model 3 can hang with those.

The Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio mentioned in the article is a sports sedan, in the likes of BMW M3 and C-Class AMG. It packs a three liter V6 capable of producing 510 bhp, and a top speed of 307km (192 mph).