Lightning Lap 2026: The Hottest Cars on America’s Toughest Track

Randy Pobst talked tangentially about this, he said that basically having brand new tires was such a powerful thing that he would tend to get his fastest times in the first couple hot laps, feeling like he should be going faster once he's more used to the car, but not actually gaining the time because the tires were no longer new. Tires are a huge asterisk in general because no matter how you slice it, "factory spec" and "same tires for everyone" are both very fair ways of doing the test. But "factory spec" is often an issue because some cars are specced in shit tires and some cars have an optional R-compound tire (usually sport cup 2s) in order to goose the numbers. And "same tires for everyone" not only requires a bunch of money be spent on shodding every car identically but also the dynamics engineers will _insist_ that they designed the car for the tires its hottest package ships on and not the "everyone uses these" tires, and also some tires just aren't available in the sizes you'd need for some cars/wheels. So it's kinda like, you do what you can, right? But then you definitely get into things like, well, this tire is a one-hit wonder and it does an amazing lap or two but then at VIR in 95F it just gets greasy and slick and you need to cool them down, but if you used this _other_ tire it's far more consistent through-out and a more reasonable representation of what owners will run, but its hottest lap isn't as good. You also get into things like, sure, this tire is great, but let's be honest, it's $2000 for a full set of four and dies after like two track days, people are going to switch to a lower-spec tire that costs $1100 for a set of four and reliably does five or six track days before really falling off. But how exactly are we going to say that's a more fair, or less fair lap time? Shrug. But all the other stuff that isn't tires I think are much more cut and dry. A hero hot lap is only worth bragging rights if you can't do a standard 20 minute session at anything resembling full send, let alone a slightly less standard 30 minute session, let alone an open track day you rented with your seventeen other buddies. If you gotta do a cooldown lap after every hot lap, that's kinda lame. If you gotta drive around the pit super slowly for fifteen minutes after every hot lap, or park the car and run the coolers at full blast after eight minutes out, that's unacceptable for a car that is sold with any sort of track aspirations.