America's Best Handling Car - Track Testing - Comparison

If you haven't, be sure to read the instrument test portion of the competition and come back this Fri. (Aug 29) to find out who we picked as this year's America's Best Handling Car.

Perhaps no other single test can reveal as much about a car's handling as a full-bore hot lap of a racetrack. Within a few high-g turns, any idiosyncrasies hidden in the chassis begin to materialize, behavior that seems benign at six-tenths may suddenly become frightening at ten-tenths; the true handling stars quickly stand out from the merely good. There's nowhere to hide. No wonder cars squeal so much when you wring 'em out around a road course.

Of course, it helps if you conduct said hot-lapping on a great track with a great driver. And for our "Apex Predators" test we had both. Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway near Monterey, California, wriggles with 2.338 miles of tight, low-speed bends, knuckle-whitening sweepers, a V-max kink, and the elevator-in-a-freefall ride that is the infamous Corkscrew. To tame this asphalt bull we turned to professional road-racing star Randy Pobst (see accompanying story), who proved his skills by needing only one warm-up lap to feel comfortable in each car, by invariably producing his fastest lap on his first flyer, and by never putting a wheel wrong all day.

Though the resulting lap times were intriguing, ranking speed wasn't our goal. Instead, after each run, Pobst provided a thorough debrief of his impressions, noting each car's strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the day-after working his way up from the slower cars to the fastest in the field-Pobst then delivered a detailed, worst-to-best finishing order from his professionally honed perspective-an invaluable addition to our objective and subjective data.

G Whiz
What better location than Laguna Seca to get into the nitty-gritty of handling. As each car travels counterclockwise around the course (the solid line), the dotted lines represent the magnitude of lateral g Randy is generating, plotted perpendicular to the driving line. Serving as a visual gauge, the width of the white band signifies 2 g (1 g to either side of the driving path). And each car's peak g in most of the corners, as well as peak speeds between them, are also indicated. As your eye travels around each one, try to feel these g-tilt slightly left or right in your chair.

You'll notice these lateral acceleration peaks are a lot higher than what we obtained earlier from the skidpad. Why? Around the skidpad, we're averaging the car's cornering, erasing any small irregularities. On an undulating track, however, road camber and vertical loading, can produce dramatic spikes in the results.

As you will see, that mammoth number-making machine -- the Viper -- is at it again here, but there are plenty of nuances to be found among the other cars as well. Note how the Viper does a big correction at the end of turn 2. Or how early the Porsche starts making lateral g entering turn 4. Ideally, each turn's cornering episode starts early, grows to be as big as possible, and ends late. But not too late, of course.