I'll Show You What Nobody Else Will About The Viper ACR

I was an unusually busy bee the night after I drove the Viper ACR at Virginia International Raceway. Wrote three reviews of the car. Two are up now, one had a longer editing and visual-content process than the other two and it's going up tomorrow. But I want to talk about something that has me thinking: laptimes.

You can read my writeup on the car for R&T here and you can find my less car-guy-oriented opinion of the car at TTAC. My third review, for WIRED, comes out tomorrow. It's also my debut at that particular publication, about which I am very pleased.

Both here and at TTAC, you will see something that none of the other nineteen journalists at the press preview are willing to show you: a complete lap of the track. Although every single person I saw in attendance had at least one GoPro and seven of the aforementioned nineteen had full-time camera/video people on staff, nobody but me is willing to show the video. Why is that?

Well, note that I am running about 2:56-2:59 in all three of my videos. (WIRED hasn't put theirs up yet; it's the fastest one because I had some aerodynamic adjustments made to my car before I took it.) For the Grand Course, that's pretty quick. But it is not as quick as the 2:49.98 set by Car and Driver during their Lightning Lap last year. The same fellow who does the Lightning Laps, the rapid and cheerful Tony Quiroga, was a drive mate of mine last week, and he had the means to record time, but if you read his writeup you will note that he declines to provide a laptime, although he drove the same cars I did and had the equipment to do it.

So, a few possibilities:

0. C/D fakes their Lightning Lap times. I don't want to believe that and I think that some of the guys on the staff have too much integrity to let that happen.

1. The Viper ACR is slower than the Viper TA. I don't think that's the case either. True, the TA would run away on the front straight of VIR, but everywhere else the ACR should have the edge.

2. The circumstances of our drive were not ideal. Well, that's certainly the case. We had instructors in the car, we were under a request to use as little curb as possible, and we were asked to be careful with the cars. That costs a lot of time. If you know your career as a journalist is over the minute you scrape the car, you won't push for the maximum time. I could have taken a lot of time off were I allowed to run the car aggressively and take some risks.

I am the only driver out of 20 journalists willing to publish a full lap video. Why, exactly, is that? Surely some of the big names in the business (like Randy Pobst and Andy Lally, both of whom showed up) are at least as fast as I am around a racetrack, right? So why not? I have my theories, but I'd be interested in hearing yours before I discuss my thoughts...