Arthur St. Antoine: I'm Arthur St. Antoine with Motor Trend Magazine and I'm here at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in Northern California where the Motor Trend staff has gathered to kick off our first ever Best Driver's Car competition. Now, you may be asking, what does that mean, best driver's car? Well, perhaps I can begin to explain that by saying what best driver's car is not. We're not looking for the car that's quickest in the quarter mile; we're not looking for the car with the most horsepower or the fattest tires; we're not even looking for the quickest lap times around this race track. True, we will be measuring all those objective numbers plus many, many more.
Well, the Motor Trend best driver's car for 2009 is not simply an exercise and impressive stats. If it were, a monkey with a computer can pick the winner for us. You see, a truly great driver's car has worked apart. Yes, it has to have an impressive performance but much more important, it's got to have usable performance and that's where expert and experienced qualitative analysis by the Motor Trend team comes in.
In handling, for instance, does a car offer mega grip but then break away violently the limit or does it turn in smoothly? Telegraphing what it's doing to the driver in the steering wheel and the seat of your pants. Rest assured, the car that does latter is going to finish higher in this test. But even great handling isn't going to be enough to win this contest, because in short, we are looking for the ultimate and driver friendliness that means accessible performance in handling, intuitive controls and exciting multi-dimensional personality that will delight and reward enthusiast driver on any road at any times, regardless of the weather or traffic conditions.
Choosing the single best driver's car isn't going to be easy, but we've got our entire roaster of vehicle experts and driving enthusiasts on hand, plus our full complement of test gear. We've got a full league of driving ahead of us; hot laps around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca including time laps with professional racer, Randy Pobst to help. Precision instrumented test by own hot choose on the runways of El Toro Marine Air Station and hundreds of miles by all of us, across some of the best driving roads in California. Frankly, we as curious to see which car shine as you are.
As I mentioned, the ten cars we've gathered together truly are something special. They include the Audi R8, the BMW 135i, the Cadillac CTS-V, the Chevrolet Camaro SS, the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, the Ford Shelby GT500, the Jaguar XFR, the Mazda MX-5 Miata, the Nissan NISMO 370Z and the Porsche Cayman S PDK. This promises to be one of the most interesting and exciting test we've ever done and when all the number and subjective impressions we are in, we're going to name the Motor Trend Best Driver's Car for 2009. So grab your driving shoes, belt in and hang on. This is going to be a fantastic ride.
While each of us will drive the tend cars around Laguna Seca, for our time laps we're turning over the wheels to professional racer, Randy Pobst. After each lapping session, I'll grab Randy for a full download of his fresh driving impressions. Randy joins us for last year's best handling car test and not only can he ring out a car as few other drivers can, he is always got a ton of enlightening commentary to share.
Randy Pobst: You can tell the Camaro feels more refined. The rear suspension has a lot of grip; I think it's capable of being a better balanced car and still being very safe and easy to drive. The CTS-V is well-balanced, minimal under steer, it's pretty easy to knock it loose with the throttle but that's just because it's so powerful. So have to slow my throttle foot down. Feed that in, roll it in and now it worked really, really well. The R8 encouraged me to go faster, faster, faster. I just have this sense like I'm in a formula car where I'm laid back and the wheels are all up higher than I am and just a thrilling and satisfying car to drive.
This ZR1 had a pretty happy tail; it would move around a fair amount. In fact, this is one of the very few cars I've ever driven here at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca where I didn't want to keep my foot down overturn too. I just was not getting messages from the car that it was going to be stable enough to go right over that brow, still flat on the floor.
In terms of handling, the 135 has kind of a combination characteristics; the initial steering response is really good. You crack the wheel and it turns right in from the corner but once the weight is transferred, there is a fair amount of body roll, significant body roll. This Mustang is balanced. In spite of its size, I could create a little under-steer, I could create a little over-steer; it was predictable in that way. It has big power, enough power to leave black stripes out of some in the corners and I'm kind of proud of that.
You look over there in Turn 4 and the black stripes are almost laid right over each other from my two laps. That's good handling because I could place the car right where I wanted it, even though I was in a power over-steer drift. These are wonderful things. I don't think it's quite ready from prime time yet; I think it could be more on rails; in other words, the car that's on rail is consistent.
You are in a corner, you don't have to think about a lot; you just crank the wheel and away you go. With the Jaguar, you got to think about it; you got to be a little careful because you get a little bit something different each time. The thing about the Cayman is, gosh, I hope they don't hate me for saying this. I think it's better than just about any 9/11, except may be a GT3 RS like the top of the top of the top and it's just the plain old Cayman. I am really impressed; again, the mid-engine that's the right place for that weight and the Cayman has the same kind of easy, low polar moment. I'm not thrown a whole lot of weight around on the way into this corner kind of feel. It's got a lot a race car and I've got to say, really enjoyed this car on the track here at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. It had a very unusual tendency to get loose; the tail would come out during the entry face of the corner. As I was turning into the corner, I could feel tail is starting to move and then it just stopped and that's all the further it went and it was a beautiful thing. I found it; I could confidently drift this car, closer to the edge of the track than any other car I've driven today and just know where it was going to be.
Mazda deserves a medal for this car. They have done such a great job. The MX-5 was so confident and inspiring, I felt like I could go flat out from the second corner out there and the combination of the extremely good brake paddle feel and steering feel and shifter feel, I could shift it quick almost like a PDK in the Porsche. It's a six-speed in this version and close ratios. It's a good feeling to me that come out of a gear at 7000 and the max gear at 6000 and still be in the power band and it makes it feel racy and you snap off those shifts and it just feels so good.
Arthur St. Antoine: Nothing like hot laps on a race track to reveal a car's strengths and weaknesses, but of course, hot laps alone only tell part of any car's story. So now, our entire circus is moving seven-hour style to the runways of El Toro Marine Air Station where we'll conduct a full battery of instrumented performance test, plus a bunch of additional driving exercises. Along the drive to El Toro, we'll be taking notes and impressions of each car in the most important environment for any production automobile, the real world.
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Real world driving is critical because it's where the car is going to be used the most. Each editor took notes on highway driving, passing performance, braking feel at less than ten tents, steering inputs and so on. It was revealing a couple of hundred miles and added greatly to our impressions gained at the test track.
We've now moved to our Best Driver's Car extravaganza to the deserted runways of the former El Toro Marine Air station in Irvine, California. For comparison purposes, here we're going to run our battery of instrumented performance tests; 0-60, quarter mile, braking, and more. We'll also have more high speed seek time for all of our editors including runs through a type autocross course. For sure, now that we've run our hot laps at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, several of the cars are standing apart from the pack, but we don't have a winner yet.
For this comparison, we are delving deep into each car's character. Some of our most interesting and esoteric tests are conducted by our own in-house Mr. Wizard, technical editor, Kim Reynolds. As usual Kim is neat deep in microchips. All these wires instruments and blinking lights look like steel spaghetti to us. But Kim has produced his usual battery of charts, specs and graphs and you want to check our motortrend.com to see all the test results Kim's begged up. El Toro also offers a chance for our test drivers to have more no holds barred fun behind the wheel.
And now I speak for the entire Motor Trend staff when I say this has been a truly amazing week; a great race track, fantastic roads and ten outstanding driver's cars, but only one winner and after crunching all the numbers, dissecting our subjective impressions and engaging in some enthusiastic, give and take, we're ready to name the Motor Trend Best Driver's Car for 2009 and that car is the Porsche Cayman S.
As with any great driver's car, the Cayman's supremacy comes in myriad forms, not just a single act. First and foremost, the Porsche possesses uncanny poise, thanks in large part to its mid-mounted 3.4 liter, 320 horse flat 6. The balance is exceptional, turning in sharp, get the rear end always stays planted unless you really kick it hard into a turn. It's almost difficult to drive Cayman S badly and much of what makes the Porsche so easy to push is its surgical steering. It's the most natural and organic steering in the group and it has the slower ratio that ensures none of the subtle messages coming up for the steering wheel a lost and the rush to steer from here to there.
Of course, what helps keep this Cayman as the ultimate Cayman are the three letters, PDK. It's a fantastic transmission, incredibly smooth, incredibly quick shifts. In fact, it's so fantastic, it managed to turn some of our naysayers its performance. Some of us found the new PDK transmission off putting at first almost entirely because the push button wheel shifters are just playing well silly. They put it in the sport plus mode, they the race track for a few laps and we are not so sure PDK needs paddles or push buttons at all.
The Cayman used a little of motion and a lot of speed. It's emotional favorite that backs up the warm fuzzy feeling Miata also creates like 1.0G of grip. It's not as wide as the MX-5 but it's more focused on speed and cornering. It's a car that can be driven very hard, very near the limit, of stability and control and yet you're always under controlled. In other words, it's the best driver's car. So congratulations to our winner, the Porsche Cayman S, Motor Trend's Best Driver's Car for 2009.
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