[Donnchadh MacGarry]

they can really do only 1 hotlap after many attempts ? well that is really quite big understimation of the skill and time involved. Also there is experienced drivers and Experienced drivers, even if you drive for few years, you will have very hard time keeping up with someone who has driven milions of km's chasing world records, especially in those cars they like a lot (also they can do more than 1 lap ).

I think what I meant more was that the absolute record pace can only be done once, the fastest and best guys can still go incredibly close to that pace for many laps in a row. Also in some cases the setup might be designed to only last a very short period of time, like using max turbo on the 80's F1 cars. I haven't driven the Lotus 98t except for a few casual laps a while back, but I seem to remember seeing on the forums from a past series that using max turbo would cause the engine to break within a few laps. So a hotlap setting for turbo couldn't be used in the race setting even by the very best drivers for example. I could be wrong on that of course.