Odd performance finding, why is regex this fast? (case closed)

Project to test yourself here

wackytoaster.at/parachute/perftest.c3p

I stumbled on this by accident. I have two operations. Compare instance variable and regex (on the same instance variable). To my surprise, regex consistently performs better somehow.

With compare instance variable it settles around 95000 repeats, but with regex it settles at around 150000 repeats.

I expected regex to perform worse if anything, not straight up 1.5 times faster! Why is that? Is my example faulty?

You can see this in action if you add a few more instances, the "compare instance variable" get's even slower as it has to loop through each instance and check to do the picking.

Ohh that's it! The regex indeed does not do any picking whatsoever. That makes sense then. I knew something was weird. Case closed :)