Comparison Tests
From the May 2011 Issue of Car and Driver
TESTED
We found a map of the Tail of the Dragon, a roadway at the extreme eastern edge of Tennessee, that included helpful arrows and notations for each of the poor saps who bought the farm on this famed little road. The notations read, “Single death, Harley-Davidson off road, hit tree,” and “Single death, sport bike low-sided into oncoming traffic.” And there are so many of these little death flags that there’s no room left on the map for any more.
We haven’t a clue whether the information on the map is accurate, but in the broad sense, it is undeniably true. This 11-mile, kabillion-turn stretch of U.S. 129 is a juking, diving, hopping, rail-free roller-coaster track, where patches of sand mysteriously appear at the apexes of blind corners, trees of considerable girth guard the land just feet from the roadway, and the unwary habitually overestimate their skill level. It’s dangerous. To the Dragon’s obstacle course, our off-season run added freezing rain, fog, and the occasional road-blocking downed tree.
But there are many tight roads that are excellent for snapping your pelvis on some roadside wood. What the Tail of the Dragon has is a bitchin’ name. One can, for example, replace the “T” with a downward-pointing dagger, if one is so darkly inclined. And “dragon”? Well, as any basement-dwelling, teenage bong aficionado knows, dragons are sweet.
It is with this in mind we sadly report that none of the makers of the three new sports coupes we’ve brought to the Dragon has any understanding of the power of a well-chosen name. What the hell is a TT RS, but the result of Audi mistakenly leaving on the caps-lock button? And the Infiniti IPL G Coupe (as Infiniti insists the name should read)? We called it, simply, the “Ipple.” And don’t even get us started on the discombobulated nomenclature of the BMW 1-series M Coupe. Shouldn’t a top-line luxury sports coupe be called the Panther or the Jesus Lizard or . . . anything?
Missed naming opportunities aside, what we gathered here was nothing short of America’s most-anticipated sports coupes—fantasy performance cars for those with sensible fantasies. We say “anticipated” because two of these three cars, the Audi and the BMW, were not yet on sale at the time of the test. The Audi won’t go on sale in the U.S. until a few months after you read this. The BMW should be available in mid-May. When we called BMW for a tester, the only 1-series M in the country was the one that served as the pace car for the Rolex 24 at Daytona. We stripped off the light bar, peeled back the stickers, and were on our way. At $47,010, the base 1M is about $12,000 more than a standard 135i. Our Valencia Orange preproduction car came with a scant $3800 in options. That makes our 1M, a relative stripper at $50,810, about $12,000 less than the base price of the charmingly named Z4 sDrive35is retractable-hardtop roadster with which it shares its 335-hp, N54 twin-turbo 3.0-liter inline-six. That makes the 1M the first M car to crib its engine, without so much as a power bump, from a non-M car. The rest of the coupe’s upgrades—including its brakes, limited-slip differential, aluminum dampers, rear subframe and suspension components, and wheels and tires—come directly from the M3.
The 1M is only the second-most-expensive car in the test, though. Here, the priciest-sports-coupe honor goes to the aluminum-trimmed blue bombshell, the TT RS, which, at an estimated as-tested price of $66,000, is freakin’ pricey. And, even more than the BMW, this Audi isn’t yet fully baked. Our test unit was a Euro-market car that differed in one critical way and a couple of minor ones from what Americans will be able to buy early this fall. First, the U.S. TT RS (oh, the uppercase!) will be offered only with a six-speed manual transmission and not the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic our test car had. Audi here in the U.S. says that since it will import fewer than 1000 examples over two years, the German bosses allowed the American arm to pick one transmission or the other, not both. “Save the Manuals!” right? Yep. Except that, as we’ll see, the DSG provides the TT RS with its most stunning trick. Audi North America is also lobbying to get a 25-hp bump, to 360, for turbocharged 2.5-liter inline-fives of U.S.-bound RSs. Although, we never wanted for more power than was provided by the Euro-spec engine in this lovely little potato dumpling.
The IPL G37 is Infiniti’s first tentative dip into the performance sub-brand game. For IPL duty, Infiniti has dropped the 348-hp version of its familiar big-bruiser 3.7-liter V-6 into the engine bay. That’s basically the same engine that’s rated at 350 horsepower in the Nissan NISMO 370Z. The IPL buyer gets a body kit, a choice of two not especially happy exterior colors (graphite or black), handsome 19-inch wheels, and all the size, weight, and equipment that comes with being the descendent of a mid-size luxury sports sedan.
Countering our initial impression that the Ipple’s look was too similar to a standard G37S for anyone to notice was a flock of G37 and Nissan 350Z drivers who would race up on our Infiniti’s back bumper and hang around our flotilla as we headed first for the Tail of the Dragon to tempt fate, and later to Michelin’s bucolic test facility in Laurens, South Carolina, to record some lap times.
