Comparison Tests
It's a sad paradox that, as performance for the dollar increases, the places you can exploit this newfound potential become increasingly regulated and overrun with other motorists. Vehicle populations have burgeoned in the past decade, and metropolitan areas worldwide have become synonymous with gridlock. (Contrary to popular belief, only 40 percent of Germany's 6000-mile-long autobahn system is unrestricted.)
What's a speed freak to do? Well, if you follow a trend that is clearly on the rise, you pay to drive on racetracks. Many of the high-performance marques out there have owners' clubs, and most of those organize track days of their own. One thing's for sure. With the cars we corralled for this comparison, high-speed testing conducted exclusively on public roads would not have been the smart move.
Exploiting all of a Chevrolet Corvette Z06's 505 horsepower on anything but a safe test facility is asking for trouble. This ultra-fast version of the American-sports-car icon has serious performance credentials, a terrific price-to-speed ratio with a base price of 70 large, and quite an impressive motorsports heritage.
But, then, so does Porsche's '07 911 GT3, which is named for a class in FIA and American Le Mans sports-car racing and, indeed, is the homologation model required for entry into those races. It has the best-sounding engine this side of an F430, but like the Ferrari, it'll cost you. The GT3 starts at $106,795 and then goes skyward — ours had the ceramic brake package and rang in at $120,670.
That's more than double the $57,915 entry price of the 2007 Lotus Exige S. This supercharged version of the best Lotus sports car ever produced wasn't initially expected to be available stateside, but wisely, Lotus changed its mind (the S is now the only Exige in the lineup). A belt-driven supercharger on the familiar Toyota-sourced four-banger gives the Exige 220 horsepower, which is getting closer to the rightful amount of power that the excellent chassis deserves.
We assembled these three cars in Southern California and included a day lapping Buttonwillow Raceway Park, west of Bakersfield. Buttonwillow has several possible configurations. We ran "Configuration Number 13," which is 2.7 miles long and far more challenging than the flat terrain suggests. Of course, we had to drive the cars on the street, too, to see how they would conduct themselves in the hands of users. As street-legal vehicles, the models featured here would very likely be called on to act as daily transportation. After all, you can't go to the track every day, can you?
In addition, we brought along three cars that were even more outside the mainstream. These three — an Ariel Atom 2, a Noble M400, and a Superformance Brock coupe — are not production cars and as such do not meet the same safety or emissions standards as the other three. Registering them for public roads varies, depending on which state you live in, and you'll have to do some assembly yourself or hire someone. We tested these cars alongside the production cars, but we didn't include them in the voting. Since they're not saddled with the weight of airbags and other EPA legalities, it simply would not be fair. We did, however, list the performance data for all the cars in the accompanying charts, and we've covered the three component cars in sidebars.
