Nissan is quite chuffed these days because they just found out that around 1.8-mile Buttonwillow Raceway’s West Loop course their new 2016 Nissan Maxima is 0.98 second quicker than the king of sports saloons, the BMW 328i. It takes a lot of explaining to clarify why that matters, but that hasn’t stop Nissan from bragging about the achievement.

We are huge fans of the 2016 Nissan Maxima because it takes whatever was good about its predecessors, all of them fine cars, and magnify them. But even us have a hard time believing that the Maxima is a better sports saloon than the BMW 3 Series. Just because it is a seconds quicker than that car around some obscure race track doesn’t make the Maxima a better performance machine.

What 2016 Nissan Maxima is best at is being, like its predecessors, an awesome and yet affordable family sedan with a beefy V6 engine, plenty of room, and decent equipment. Nissan should focus on making the Maxima better than cars like the Kia Optima and Hyundai Azera and stop wasting their time trying to prove it’s a better track car than the Bimmer. Nobody seeking performance is going to even consider a Maxima.