I was bored so I plotted the Top Gear leader board results against HP/weight (Source Data is Here: http://www.fastestlaps.com/tracks/top_gear_track.html).

In theory, the more powerful and lighter cars should accelerate faster and have better times (Simple F=Ma).

However there should be a general trend from exotics to econo boxes, so I fit a crude model to the diverse data to find this trend. Below is the data plot (blue dots) and the fit (red line). The X axis is the ranking (from first place to 197th) so the best lap times (super-cars) are generally on the left.

I then compared each car's individual results against the model. In theory, a car with a certain hp to weight ratio should place on the red line. If it does better or worse then the driver, tires, car set up, driver mass and "magic" must be the reason.

Here is the list. There are some surprises.

As an example the GT-R is superb. Its HP to weight is 0.31 but it performs like a car who has a 0.50 ratio of HP to weight.

This data is even more interesting as show how much the car out performs relative to its hp/weight (the plot above is magnitude of deviation), this plot attempts to normalize the data to pit supercar against econobox:

Edited April 27, 201212 yr by Blue

Hmm Vettel & Barichelo drove the Suzuki's so the maths "found" them