What car—for the money—delivers the best combination of power, handling, and braking? That question is fundamental to the ongoing mission of this magazine and the core element of all our road tests. We should also point out that those traits are the key ingredients of a car’s fun-to-drive (FTD) quotient, something we value far more than cup holders and/or trunk volume.
But—and this is widely overlooked—the elements of FTD are also the key components of active safety, a vehicle’s ability to respond to and avoid an accident situation. The lane-change exercise, part of our comparison-test regimen, provides insight to this ability, but Lightning Lap delivers an indelible blueprint. Unless you’re a taxi driver in Baghdad, you might argue that no accident-avoidance situation goes on for three minutes, but of course our interest extends beyond dodging drivers whose text messaging overrides their attention to the road. We want to see how well a wide variety of performance cars combine their various dynamic elements in absolute terms in a controlled environment.
Controlled environment means racetrack, and for Lightning Lap that means the 4.2-mile Grand Course at Virginia International Raceway, near Danville, Virginia. This beautiful road circuit is an outstanding blend of fast chutes, blind-entry corners, and lots of changes in elevation, including a series of climbing esses that’s one of the most challenging sections of racetrack in America.
We rank our finishers strictly on lap times, taking the best run achieved by each car during our two-day event. The cars are grouped by price, and there was some very fast traffic this year in the upper groups (LL3 and LL5; there were no cars in the LL4 price category). The four fastest all lapped VIR quicker than our previous absolute record of 2:58.2/82.7 mph. How much quicker? Read on. And let the games begin.
