Velocity

Your broker calls with exceptionally good news. And you just happen to have a vacant stall in your four-car garage. Friend, you deserve a new car, something exceptional. But what to buy? Sophisticated British performance coupe or bare-knuckled Detroit street brawler? European exotic or off-beat retro roadster? Bargain American performance machine or big-fun German sportscar? Bavarian ber-convertible or Italian lust icon? One could spend many sleepless nights wrestling with such thorny issues.

For most of us, this is an exercise in pure fantasy; for a fortunate few, it's a tantalizingly hard choice. Regardless of your personal circumstances, to add depth and detail to those fantasies, Motor Trend has once again assembled a sampler of some of the most desirable exotic cars currently available in America. The mix ranges from the comparatively affordable and ubiquitous $39,000 Corvette (think of it as the real-world control sample in this group) all the way up to the rare and very dear $138,000 Ferrari 355 F1. We've even thrown in a wild card, the Ford Cobra-powered Panoz AIV Roadster, poised to pounce on the next sunny afternoon that comes along. We'll bet that somewhere in this field of eight is the car of your dreams.

With vehicles as dissimilar and disparate in price as these, picking a single winner would be a futile effort. The perspective is entirely different depending on your personal needs and the height of the mountain of cash you're standing on.

So we set out on a week-long, three-state driving adventure to explore the performance potential of these awesome vehicles and to paint a picture of what they're really like to live with.

Two cutting-edge test facilities marked our route: Ford's Arizona Proving Grounds and its engineering-award-winning 5-mile high-banked oval, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway's beautiful new complex of racetracks, including a high-banked tri-oval superspeedway. Eight great cars, two fabulous tracks, 1500 miles of desolate desert pavement, and an unlimited supply of unleaded premium.

Care to come along?

* Aston Martin DB7 Coupe
* BMW M Roadster
* Chevrolet Corvette Coupe
* Dodge Viper GTS
* Ferrari 355 F1
* Lotus Esprit V-8 Turbo
* Panoz AIV Roadster
* Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe

Dodge Viper GTS
Can last year's champ retain its crown?As defending champion from last year's May '97 "High-Speed Gamble" shootout, the Dodge Viper GTS returned to face a fresh batch of competitors in the Motor Trend equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Producing battleship levels of torque from the 8.0-liter/450-horsepower OHV V-10 engine that even the 13-inch-wide Michelin Pilot SX tires struggle to harness, it's still amazing that the Viper GTS reached 60 mph in a mere 4.1 seconds. Judicious throttle application rockets the macho machine down the quarter mile in 12.2 seconds at 118.6 mph, obliterating the smaller-displacement field like so many econocars.

Orbiting the skidpad like a 3375-pound centrifuge, the Viper GTS sloshed our internal organs at 1.01 g, snatching the event from the tenacious Lotus (0.98 g). The nasty Dodge then slithered triumphantly through the slalom cones like a hell-spawned serpent at 72.5 mph, blowing away even the mighty Ferrari.

Tearing around the 5-mile banked oval, demolecularizing swarms of ornery desert insects, the GTS squeezed past last year's 187.3-mph best to reach a sweaty-palmed 192.6 mph-a full 13 mph faster than second-place Lotus! The Olympian effort made by this crimson missile blew a water pump gasket, squirting a heady stream of green coolant for an impossible length of time. Admittedly, the car had 11,000 abusive journalist miles on it as delivered, equivalent to 44,000 quarter-mile runs-which may not be too far from the truth.