Which is why I said it is more social instead of saying it is solely a social engineering solution to the problem...
I thought we're talking about the carousel at Road America? That corner is (or should be) flat all the way around in most formula cars, all the way to champ cars. It is as close as you get to steady state on a road course and as you say how setup problems are amplified on an oval, the carousel is also a good place to assess the balance of the car as the driver inputs are mostly taken out of the equation by mid corner. Since as you say drivers talk more about the transients getting good feedback on steady state balance at a point of amplification will give you the most unbiased knowledge about the setup of the car and likely uncover similar shortages that are covered up by the talk of the transients everywhere else around the track. So, when you talk about the carousel the questions, the driver feedback and the car's feedback are very similar to how you analyze getting a car around an oval. Yes, on an oval the car is predisposed to turn that direction with a specific setup (which includes the all fundamental yaw damping in that configuration), but the fundamental physics and analysis is the same.
Again, I think this depends moreso on the driver. A great driver will drive a bad car as fast as anyone else that day by driving around the car's shortcomings, at least on a road course. A good driver can take a good car and drive it as fast as the rest of them. But in steady state you hopefully are removing the driver from the equation provided similar sized gonads. Anything the driver has to do to adapt to the car not being neutral will slow him down. But I still argue a O/S steering correction at full throttle, provided the yaw angles are small, will be faster than rotating the car by trail braking or inducing trailing throttle oversteer to drive around U/S. But you are correct, for this to work the cars must remain within their working slip angles as if one end fully falls over the cliff the corner is done and the driver is back in the equation way beyond any minor steering corrections.