Watch Tesla's Record-Breaking Laguna Seca Lap
engadget.com
engadget.com
They probably coded it to "turn on the brake cooling pump for corner 1, 4 and 5" or something like that. Hand writing code for a single track doesn't make it a great car to buy unless you want to drive it on this very specific track.
Not necessarily. You can use engineering prototypes or track-cars, as long as you compare it against other track cars.
The problem here is: the Tesla S is clearly some kind of modified car (its unspecified, but it is clearly an engineering prototype), and Tesla is trying to compare this prototype against production, road-legal cars.
If you're doing prototype vs prototype, then you've opened up a whole can of high-performance worms, such as TCR series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCR_Touring_Car), which easily smash 1:35 on Laguna Seca. And yes, all TCR cars are 4-door sedans.
Note that TCR Cars are only allowed to have a 2.0 Liter engine with 2-wheel traction only. So formula TCR isn't exactly "no holds barred", its a strict formula so that racers can be on equal footing between different makes and models.
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The CTS-V run from 2016 was a production car on production tires. It was rock-stock, precisely the same vehicle you could have bought from a dealership. That's what made the 1:39 score from CTS-V so amazing: it was a production car that broke the 1:40 barrier. It was fully road-legal: you could drive your kids to school, then get on Laguna Seca to hit 1:39, and then go home afterwards.