Dawn sneaks up on the high desert unheralded. Unlike roosters, Gila monsters don't crow, so there's no sound to announce the gathering light. The truck-stops along this interstate artery to Los Angeles maintain their same busy activity, a pace unaffected by the time of day. This morning, though, an inexplicable column of shiny, new cars files out of Barstow's Holiday Inn parking lot and onto the interstate that cuts east across the sand to the Nevada border.
As the smoldering disc of the sun begins to edge over the horizon, our column of speed burners pulls into the day's test venue-a forgotten three-mile chunk of road running parallel to the interstate. With the proper permits filed, this weathered, crumbling piece of asphalt is ours until sunset. Built in the late '50s when the then-new interstate cut off access to a home among the creosote bush, Mrs. Orcutt's driveway, as it's known, was constructed to silence the persistent and obviously effective complaints of a nice old lady.
Mrs. Orcutt has since surrendered to the elements. For all we know, her bleached bones still rest among the collapsed remains of her forgotten shack. But her driveway, a monument to her persistence, lives on. Showing its age now, the driveway hasn't had a lick of maintenance in almost four decades. Never mind, it suits our purposes almost ideally. Though about 30 years overdue for a resealing job, the surface affords reasonably good grip. Desert dust and bits of dislodged gravel carpet the road, but that only adds to the adrenaline-steeped spectacle; at speed, a car trails a rooster-tail of dust that looks as if Halley's comet is making a low-altitude fly-by.
What the drivers on the parallel interstate a quarter mile distant make of this is anybody's guess.
With about three and a quarter miles of useable straightaway, the driveway is just long enough for cars in this speed range. Roughly speaking, sub-170-mph street cars reach nearly 90 percent of top speed in the first mile, build another 6 or 8 percent by the end of the second mile, and take the final mile to claw their way up the last few percent. The spare quarter mile is reserved for enthusiastic braking to avoid careening through the remains of the Orcutt estate.
All of our cars attained their terminal velocity over the measured three miles, but the fastest ones had little acreage to spare. Significantly faster cars require substantially more room, and that generally means moving the whole show to a huge oval or circular track-but you can't buy that kind of speed for $50,000, so for this test, Orcutt's was just fine.
We were interested not only in how fast our field of 16 went, but in how quickly it got there. To conduct this test without messing up the cars' aerodynamics by using external test gear, we employed the Stalker Acceleration Testing System. Though normally arrayed as a stationary system outside the car, the Stalker can be mounted entirely inside the car, with its radar gun firing straight ahead out the windshield. The unit's precise speed data are then processed by a special program in a laptop computer, generating the speed/distance plots that accompany this story. We used a second stationary radar gun (operating on a different frequency band) at the three-mile mark as a cross-check. You'll notice that our top-speed plots begin at the quarter-mile mark, picking up where our conventional quarter-mile acceleration numbers leave off.
The fascination with top speed runs deep-and is no doubt heightened by how rarely (if ever) people have the luxury of experiencing it in a truly fast car. Furtive bursts above 100 mph no more prepare you for a 167-mph ride in a Corvette, than a walk in the foothills prepares you for an assault on Everest. The idea is the same, but the shift in scale is difficult to comprehend.
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