This piece isn't about Nurburgring lap times, although, for a bit, it is going to be about Nurburging lap times. Bear with.
This makes the Golf GTI better. Much better
Some will tell you the Nurburgring is a pointless place to make road cars, which obviously it isn't, otherwise thousands of engineers in dozens of engineering centres each costing millions of pounds wouldn't be there. The car industry is sometimes profligate with its money, but it doesn't do that kind of thing for giggles.
It's a test centre, then. And, hey, if you're there, doing development work, and you've got data-logging equipment on your car, and you're doing some braking or cooling or limit-handling or other component durability work and you've got a handy driver at the wheel then, well, you're basically going to find out how fast your car is anyway, right? You might as well write it down. It's yet another internal performance benchmark. It's worth having.
And so it has become, like London buses or football pitches, an accepted standard unit of measurement. (Like those, sometimes it even changes on a whim. Benny Leuchter, who set a lap time in the VW Golf Clubsport S, told me that two different days might outwardly look the same, but that he'd see four, five seconds difference in lap times.)
But what's important - and the industry knows this as well as you and I do - is that a lower number doesn't necessarily make for a car that's better to drive.
A marketing department might tell the world about it - the Porsche 911 GT2 RS is the latest recipient of swoons from some, resigned sighs from others, because of its highly publicised 6m 47.3s lap time - but it has no bearing on whether a car is any good or not.
And there is, perhaps, a groundswell of feeling - and it's one I have some sympathy with - that it shouldn't keep going like this.
The time itself is, really, just a by-product of how fast a car maker wants its car to be. The faster a car is, the quicker it'll go around the place, and I think that's what, ultimately, people hate about quoted 'ring times. That some cars are becoming too fast to be regularly enjoyed.
But you can't blame the Nurburgring for that: bloody 'ring times, coming over here, stealing our handling delicacy. No, simply, on each occasion a time comes down, it means performance limits are inevitably going up.
And that's just the result of the wider, perhaps concerning (perhaps not, you tell me) trend that nobody in the industry has the nerve to stop, even if they wanted to. 'You know what? Our next car is going to be willfully slower than the current one,' is a very hard sell to customers and shareholders.
Take McLaren, for example. It's reticent to quote Nurburgring lap times to the extent that, with the 570S sports series car, "it was all about making a very engaging sports car, not about how fast this car can go around the 'ring to the point where we didn't even measure a time," according to Andy Palmer (the other one), its vehicle line director.
Which is great, if, as McLaren was, you're starting with a clean slate. See also: the Toyota GT86/Subaru BRZ, a car created from scratch for purity, not performance.
But can you imagine the 570S's replacement - or the GT86/BRZ's, if there is one - being slower than today's cars? McLaren is deep into its next 'Ultimate Series' car now, the three-seat 'BP23', which will be, unashamedly, a road going GT car. It is not a P1 Mk2, an all-conquering hypercar. But it will still be, in an ambiguous way, "the fastest McLaren ever", because, frankly, you might not buy it otherwise.
Your 'ring lap time, then, is merely a tell-tale - like a shrinking 0-62mph time or ever-increasing horsepower output - for a deeper, maybe worrying (maybe not) trend in the business, where cars become faster and faster and the great challenge is to keep them relevant to the kind of driving that most of us are engaged in. The GT2 RS's 6m 47.3s just represents a relentless pursuit of power and grip, taking its limits further from a point where they can be routinely approached.
Once, the wider world had its 'Lotus Carlton' moment, where it got really annoyed by the performance potential of a family car. Today there are dozens of family cars that go like a Lotus Carlton. It doesn't look like it will have another moment like that, so until it does, so the momentum builds, and if you're a manufacturer who wants to get off: good luck.