First time I've seen this thread. As posted, Skroting, and IH8Skylines are some of the fastest drivers. There's also a few others that are very fast.
The issue though is that some PC machines are going to result in faster lap times with NFSU than others. The difference is that on some machines things that should slow down a car don't have as much effect on these NFSU "friendly" machines, this includes just cornering, landing from jumps, and wall scraping or banging.
Skrotings videos are fast, but with his older system he was faster still, but unable to make the videos as the older machine was too slow to allow a capture with fraps.
So it's difficult to tell how much of these lap times are driver skill and how much is due to advantages of one PC machine versus another. I'm hoping that this is fixed in NFSU2.
If you have a fast system, and play NFSU version 1.0 from your cd-rom, turn down graphics, vsync off, and the game goes into hypermode, a sample video of a sub 40 sec lap time at Market Street, not clean at all because it's next to impossible to control the car:
msfst.wmv
When EA patched the game to fix this, they overdid it and now faster systems are penalized a bit compared to slower systems.
Also on some medium speed systems, running fraps can help improve lap times. Not sure if there's much effect with faster systems.
I've started another thread about this if you want to read more about it. Nice to see that you guys enjoyed the videos though.
Regarding the setups, I've now just gone back to engine, ecu, turbo for most of the tracks. If you look at Skrotings replays, it explains which car and which setups he used. Some of this is also PC dependent though.
Lastly, my all cars file now include 8 different 3 TJ combinations for racing (installed on all 20 garage cars too):
nfsuac.zip