Above: The world's fastest Honda Civic set the high-water mark for front-drive cars at the Bonneville Salt Flats last year: 204.287 mph. Sport compacts have caught many auto fans by surprise with performance better than most experts believed possible from front-drive vehicles.
Photo courtesy of Progress Group
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this new wave of road rockets is their performance capabilities right off the showroom floor. A few churn out more than 135 horsepower per liter in stock form. Stir in a few aftermarket components, and you can achieve 200 horsepower per liter or more. In racing form, these front-drive vehicles have stymied physics pundits who believed that a car driven by its front wheels could never approach even a 10-second quarter mile. Performance sport-compact cars are now knocking on the door of sub-seven-second runs at faster than 180 mph. And who knows where it'll end? It's a simple case of a love for speed overcoming physics calculations.
There are more than 20 different significant performance sport-compact vehicles on the market, including some powerful models from Detroit's Big Three. While these American cars may not yet have the youth appeal of the Japanese models that started the trend, they're now challenging the Asian automakers at their own game. For now, however, Japanese cars still dominate the public's interest in sport compacts.
And due to the undeniable success of the automotive aftermarket, O.E. manufacturers are now involving the makers of these components in the creation of their products from the get-go. Which makes it that much easier for the enthusiast to get the performance he craves right up front. You see, we can all just get along. And isn't it about time?