++COMMENT++
Date du tour
23 Nov, 2025
Temps du tour
1:40.961
(+0.83s)
Température extérieure
14° C
Fresh Pirelli P Zero in OE spec.
SPC 81260 front camber bolts. -2.5º front / -2.3º rear camber.
N Performance front brake pads.
Otherwise stock.
This was my first time with the 5 N at Laguna Seca, and I didn't know what to expect. This was my third "push" lap of the day, so there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I did 7 more laps in 1:41.x during the day, and was on a 1:40.7x lap when I saw the final checkered flag of the day and had to abort the attempt.
Sub-1:40 is definitely possible with some refinement to my driving. On factory tires lol. And you can take a family for a Costco run on the way back from the track. Crazy!
The acceleration on the straights is amazing (to put things in perspective, you can see how much I'm gaining on the GT4 at 1:50 in the video) and the tires are definitely the limiting factor when it comes to pace over a single lap. I can imagine that this car can do 1:35-1:37 on proper track tires. (wheel and tire sponsors are welcome!)
The brakes are the next limiting factor at a track with Laguna Seca, where you brake from 132 (!!) mph to ~40 mph (212 → 64 km/h) while dropping 45 ft (~13 m) in altitude. Even with the "N Performance" front pads made by Ferodo, I would start to smell the brakes after 3 consecutive "push" laps, and the brakes were properly hot (over 800ºF/420ºC) after the 4th (as measured with an IR camera). That being said, 3-4 laps is still more than I was expecting for such a heavy and powerful car, so I have nothing to complain about. The factory brake cooling deflectors do a good job of cooling down the rotors from just driving at city speeds for 5 minutes. The regen-only braking and stopping also helps cool down the brakes as evenly as possible.
That being said, the N Performance pads didn't show any signs of fade or elevated wear rate.
The next limiting factor is the battery temperature. That being said, the car can still go very fast even with a hotter battery, it's just maybe a second a lap slower if you don't cool down the battery.
All in all, doing bursts of 2-3 push laps, 2-3 cooldown laps, then another 2-3 push laps works pretty well. Apart from that, the car was doing full 20 minutes no problem in the 70ºF/21ºC weather, consuming 35–40% of battery per session.
Now here's the kicker: no charging at Laguna. Even though there's a Tesla Supercharger in the paddock, it's not accessible to non-Tesla owners through the Tesla app... (if you know a workaround, please let me know!)
As a result, I had to drive ~20 minutes straight from the track to Nob Hill in Salinas (good way to cool down the brakes!), charge there at 100-125 kW for 20-30 minutes, then drive back for 20 minutes just to arrive 5-10 minutes before my next session. That's a little intense, but doable. You get a little more time if you don't drive the whole 20 minutes.
In this lap I was still figuring out some quirks of the electronics. I had ESC set to "Sport" (not "Off") in this session, and only switched it to full Off later in the day. To my surprise, the car was actually easier to drive without the ESC! With ESC Sport, the brakes would often unnecessarily interfere under trail braking induced rotation, causing loss of speed and momentum. Another quirk was that when using NGB, if you brake and try to downshift, that does not disable NGB. And when NGB is on you can't downshift. So that would pop a warning on the dash, and not give you the engine sound as you enter the corner, and also put you in the unknown gear when it's time to accelerate again. As a workaround, I later started to disengage NGB manually right before hitting the brakes.
All in all, this car keeps amazing me, and almost bending the laws of physics (it certainly bends space-time around it due to its mass hehe).
Cheers!
Thumbnail photo by Trevor Ryan.
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