As a GC language Common Lisp is slow as molasses. However, in the realm of languages which are slow as molasses it's got quite acceptable performance. I suppose it's in part because it's alien technology from beyond the bounds of the multiverse, but also in part due to the fact that we had really interesting tech back in the '70s and '80s that kinda got lost during the so-called AI winter.
To add on to that, with declarations the programmer can tell the Lisp compiler that (for example) a variable can be stack allocated to help improve performance. The fact that Lisp code is just data is another benefit towards performance as it means macros are relatively easy to write so some computation can be done at compile time. There are also various useful utilities in the spec which can be used to help profile execution of a program to aid in optimization, such as time and trace.
News flash, but Lisp compilers have gotten better since the 80's. In general, normal, unoptimized Lisp is probably on-par with Java, while optimized Lisp with a good compiler can get on par with C++. SBCL is a very good compiler, and GC technology has come a long way.
SBCL is fantastic, but the resources being poured in GCC and LLVM combined with CPU manufacturers including architectural features to help C and related procedural languages work better make it a massive uphill battle. I suppose that with proper use of things like sb-simd and arena allocation you can get in the ballpark of C, but with some tweaking C, C++, and Rust can get insanely fast (of course Fortran's better, but nothing compares to it, so let's leave that aside for now).