THE OLD BLACK FIREBIRD was blocking our exit from the gas station. As the passenger door opened, I saw the look on the face of the immense, camouflage-clad good ol' boy who sprang out like he'd just spotted a new form of game on his personal hunting grounds. Throwing the Cadillac ATS-V coupe into neutral, I jumped out to greet the man before he reached our group. I spotted a sun-worn but freshly polished badge on the Pontiac's front fender. No way. Could it be?

"Eighty-eight GTA, am I right?"

The driver, also wearing full hunting camo but half the size of his friend, laughed behind his wraparound sunglasses.

"Yeah! Been working on her for a while. Lot of specific parts to this model, you know? Everything from steering wheel to spoiler. Hard to get. What you boys doing down here? Some kind of test? That's the new Ferrari, right?"

"488 GTB," the hulking passenger clarified.

"Which makes this," and I paused for effect, "GTA meets GTB." In the space of the next few minutes, everybody shook hands and swapped stories and linked up on Instagram. Our new friends offered us some advice for finding a good meal and avoiding the local speed traps. They seemed to know almost as much as we did about our eight contenders, from the sleek Mercedes-AMG GT S to the flamboyant Shelby GT350R, although they readily admitted that our outrageous-looking Continental GT3-R was the first Bentley they'd ever seen in the metal. They also offered us some words of caution.

"Man, some of these roads are pretty tight, even for a car with this much power," the driver suggested, pointing at the GTA's hood and the 225-hp V-8 beneath it. "And these cars got … twice as much power?"

"In some cases, almost three times as much," I replied, dropping into the deep Competition Sport bucket seat of the 650-hp Z06. The look I received in return contained both envy and pity. Sentiments I wouldn't understand in their entirety until later, after I'd spent two full days hammering up and down these rural roads like a caffeine-powered cruise missile, my eyeballs shaking in their sockets and my hands sore from a hundred midcorner corrections, my internal accelerometer recalibrated to something between roller coaster and F-15 Strike Eagle.

"Y'all be careful, now," the man with the Firebird said, as I fired up the supercharged Vette and started backing out of my parking spot. "Y'all be careful."

THE CONTENDERS

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

WELCOME BACK, MY FRIENDS, to Performance Car of the Year, commonly abbreviated to PCOTY and pronounced to rhyme with "free-floaty." This year, the first two days of testing will see our eight contenders cover 500 miles of lightly inhabited two-lanes, from Berea, Kentucky, through the Daniel Boone National Forest, and down to Cookeville, Tennessee. From there, we'll take the longest way possible to NCM (National Corvette Museum) Motorsports Park, next to the famous Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

At the track, editor-in-chief Larry Webster will set lap times on a configuration that joins NCM West and East circuits into a loop of just under three miles. This favors cars with some irrational exuberance in the boiler room, which is good, because nearly every member of this year's lineup can spin the needle off a chassis dyno.

For the previous two years of PCOTY, we invited cars that connected with the driver on both road and track, cars that engendered a visceral, emotional reaction in the man or woman holding the steering wheel. That hasn't changed for this third go-round, but now we're insisting that our entrants live at the very top of the street-car performance pyramid. In this league, a competitive lap time is mandatory. You can get there with biplane wings and massive splitters—hello, Viper ACR. Or you can do it with finesse—nice to see you, Porsche Cayman GT4. We don't care how you get there, but get there if you can. Or we'll leave you behind.

THE ROAD

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

IT'S SUNRISE OF DAY ONE, cold enough for the heaters to be on in all the cars and for the road to skitter a bit beneath summer-spec tires. After a short drivers' meeting, we head for the proverbial hills. I've decided to look after myself by snagging the Bentley to start the morning. It's the only all-wheel-drive car in the test, feeding 572 hp and 518 lb-ft of torque (592 hp, 553 lb-ft on overboost) through a not-so-old-school eight-speed torque-converter automatic in a manner reminiscent of an aircraft-carrier catapult. Can it turn like the Cayman GT4? Of course not—but to make pace on unknown roads, nothing quite satisfies like straight-line power.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Observe: Contributor Chris Chilton, the other English import in this test, is ahead of me in the Z06, attempting to deal with the Corvette's considerable width, the unfamiliar-to-him left-hand steering, and the treacherous tarmac all at once. He has no answer for the Bentley's superb traction at corner exit. I'm reeling him in like a fish out of every turn, one finger on the wheel, mostly focusing on the lovely sound system. I'm listening to Seasons, recorded by my friend Anthony Wilson and three other classical guitarists at the Met in 2011. And through the noise-killing double-glazed glass, I'm watching a silent movie titled Skilled Driver Working Hard in Supercharged Corvette. Nice combination. Very posh.

The pace of the 488 GTB is not to be understood by mere mortals. It is too fast for any road in existence.

Later in the day, web editor Travis Okulski will come to the same conclusion about the pace and audio fidelity: "I feel like I'm driving an issue of The Absolute Sound." But he complains about the extraneous pops and crackles from the exhaust. The thing to do is take the massive alloy shifter out of Sport mode, which makes the car quieter but no slower.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Indeed, it's hard to imagine going any faster on a public road. I have some concerns about the brakes, which get a little soft over the course of the day, but I can't easily contain my excitement for the GT3-R. Contributing editor Richard Pinto isn't a fan: "Every degree of steering results in a slight squeal from the front tires." Well, the car does weigh 5000 pounds, you know. But the light steering is trustworthy, and although it's impossible to escape the Bentley's inertia, there is always time to fix whatever problems one might encounter through an excess of gentlemanly enthusiasm.

It's depressing to close the Continental's power-assisted carbon-fiber door for the last time and hop over to the Cadillac ATS-V. The little silver coupe has many of the things we love about a car: close-coupled cockpit, manual transmission, good forward sightlines. The twin-turbo V-6, on the other hand, makes no friends among the staff despite a generous 464-hp output. "The ATS-V is more like a really well-sorted BMW 435i rival than an M4 competitor," Chilton sniffs. "I kept looking for the sickly goat that I was sure was trapped under the hood, but all I could find was an engine," says contributor Colin Comer.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Driven in isolation, the ATS-V would feel like a powerful and refined sporting coupe, but the front end is almost overeager to bite. "I can drive the piss out of this car," Webster notes, no doubt because it feels suspiciously like it's been aligned to SCCA Showroom Stock specifications. The interior is a cost-cutting mishmash to some of us, but there's little to criticize about the sleek and well-proportioned body. "If only it had the old CTS-V coupe's engine," Bowman sighs, and everybody nods. That supercharged V-8 never failed to show up for work on time.

Neither does the Corvette Z06's LT4, and it won't let you forget it. From the deep front splitter to the oddly morose expression produced by the wide-body rear end, the bumblebee-colored Vette positively exudes menace. And the V-8 can cash every check the visual package writes, with funds to spare. Webster loves the thing so much he borrows the language of pyrotechnics: "Explosive … lighting a fuse … stellar engine … so much firepower on tap."

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Maybe too much firepower. On these old moonshiners' roads, with their off-camber switchbacks and occasional stomach-dropping plunges followed by blind 90-degree turns, I'd rather be in a base Corvette Stingray, a sentiment echoed by Okulski ("It does 90 in second gear. Why?") and editor-at-large Sam Smith ("The extra power feels like a hindrance.") The astounding speeds possible down even the briefest straights combine with strong steering assist to give the impression of low front grip. Chilton advises that if I can just get used to the light wheel, I'll trust the front tires. That never quite happens for me. I'm always a bit nervous. It's just not as happy on the road as its naturally aspirated sibling.

And that's okay. Think of the Z06, particularly in the all-out Z07 Ultimate Performance Package trim driven here, as the fan-service Vette. From the black trim to the transparent panel in the Gurney flap to the omnipresent smell of hot resin, it's the most Corvette-ish Corvette you can buy from your local Corvette store. That's why it exists. Period, point-blank.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Out of the Z06 and into the Viper ACR. Its massive track-only front splitter extension, part of the Extreme Aero package, has been removed for our drive to Tennessee, and the Bilsteins have been set to their most road-friendly positions, but there's no disguising that the word "road," in the context of this massive coupe, should always be followed immediately by "course." You just have to resign yourself to frequent jarring impacts. The stereo, derided by Smith as "AM-radio quality," would best be put to work playing a loop of some Yeageresque pilot reassuring you about turbulence. With benefit of hindsight, the Z06 was a luxury car, a veritable Corvette Fleetwood Brougham compared with this.

Deputy editor Joe DeMatio, visibly apprehensive before stepping into the composite chrysalis of the Viper, emerges a beautiful butterfly of a fan: "Quite the roller-coaster ride. Second or third gear, 4000 to 6000 rpm, was my sweet spot. I only wished for a proper dead pedal. What's there feels like a bolt in the floor." His enthusiasm is lasting; the next day he tells us, "I let some distance open up between me and the rest of the pack. No traffic, and I had the hill climb to myself. Wow. The sound, the grip, the way I was able to devour that section of road. That will stay with me."

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Webster disagrees, sharply: "This is an overcooked car, overdone." True, on the road, you'd rather not have nearly a ton of aerodynamic downforce. Comer, who has a business buying and selling classic vehicles and is no stranger to owning cars that draw a crowd, has doubts: "I think I am just way too old to drive a car with a wing that big on the road without looking like a fool… . It is about twice as big as the wing on my current GT-1/Trans-Am car." Well, Mr. Comer, that's because the SCCA has rules about your Trans-Am racer. Driving a Viper, like riding an open-piped Harley Shovelhead, is to place one's self outside the influence of anything so stifling as "rules."

Operating the ACR stirs the Walt Whitman within my soul: If I worship any particular thing, it shall be some of the might of the Viper. / Massive biplane wing, it shall be you. / Delivery-truck growl, side pipes hot as the fires of Sheol, it shall be you! / Removable fender vents, fragile as porcelain and attached by insubstantial bolts, it shall be you!

Stirred by love for all things bright and Viperful, I ask the girl behind the counter at Subway, who looks remarkably like a young Nastassja Kinski, to come outside and just look at the ACR with me, possibly for the afternoon. She declines immediately, but then she inquires about the Ferrari parked next to it.

When it leaves terra firma, the Ferrari issues a gentle beeping noise to alert the driver, in case heart-in-throat does not do it. Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Ah, the Ferrari. "This is my forever car, right here," Webster declares as he steps out to hand me the keys, and who can blame him? It's the most powerful of our eight entrants, yet it behaves like a Honda Civic in low-speed urban driving. It's the only car here with proper sports-car proportions, low and small and tidy, yet the cockpit easily takes two six-foot-three occupants with helmets. One switch summons a thrilling wail, while another awakens a stereo with peerless Bluetooth integration.

So you do what I do, which is use that Bluetooth to call every one of your friends, get their voice-mail notifications, then leave them two-minute messages of the 3.9-liter, dry-sump V-8 screaming to the 8000-rpm redline over and over again, announced each time by a series of red LEDs built into the carbon-fiber-covered steering wheel. Tug the right-side paddle, and the dual-clutch seven-speed transmission seamlessly starts the process over again.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

"It's a proper hooligan if you want it to be, and more indulgent of silliness than any of the other cars here," an enthralled Chilton says. Truly, the pace of the 488 GTB is not to be understood by mere mortals. It is too fast for any road in existence. So, too, was its 458 Speciale predecessor, but that car made you work a bit. With the turbocharged 488, effort is replaced by joy in a sort of lost-wax casting process occurring within one's soul.

The AMG is very fast, very easy to drive, brilliant interior. The whole thing feels like it's milled from a single billet of high-quality aluminum.

After lunch, it's a Le Mans start from the restaurant booth, so I do the natural thing and run to the Ford. This Mustang is very much the track variant, squatting on suspiciously sticky rubber and what looks like three degrees of negative front camber. After the frenzied Ferrari, I'm hoping to catch my breath, to relax a bit behind the family-sedan-sized wheel of a nice, friendly big grand tourer. The clutch is comically light, like it's sourced from a Fiesta. That's good. But from the moment I start the engine …

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Let me explain. The only way the team at Ford Performance could get 526 hp from 5.2 liters—the fabled 100 hp per liter and then some—was to reengineer the whole thing into a bit of an insane race motor. Flat-plane crankshaft. So I open the throttle, following Webster in his beloved Ferrari up a series of sharp hillside hairpins that seem designed to test second-gear acceleration and broken-asphalt traction at the same time, and the moment the tach hits about five grand, I hear The Sound.

I firmly believe that when human civilization finally collapses and our descendants are nothing but hipster-bearded cavemen on a quest for fire, stories of The Sound will still be told every night, to frighten children and preserve all that is worth preserving of Western civilization. From generation to generation. "What an engine! What a noise!" says Chilton, in much the same way that human beings will ten, twenty, fifty thousand years from now.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

They say that the government has special machines that can emit certain frequencies and make you throw up. I tell you that the Mustang emits certain frequencies that improve your humanity, that force you into a sympathetic resonance, your heart swelling as the needle twists to the final destination. Ahead of me, Webster is unable to pull away. It's Ford versus Ferrari all over again. ("I wasn't trying," he will later say, somewhat petulantly.) The Sound lashes me in waves from beneath the oddly shaped hood, all sperm-whale blunt-faced menace, and I'm reminded of Stubb, the second mate on the Pequod: "Hurrah! This whale carries the everlasting mail!"

At a lonely Dairy Queen somewhere on the desolate flat plain between two cold mountains in Tennessee, Smith, Okulski, and I take turns enthusing about the GT350R. Bowman calls it "the Mustang that all Mustangs have been waiting to become." But DeMatio and Webster have equally kind words for the Cayman GT4. I'd better check it out. "Jump into the car and it immediately just feels right," DeMatio offers. "The seat, the shifter, the steering wheel—all made for drivers." I have to agree. The fixed buckets combine with the high but linear control efforts to inspire confidence, and I'm pushing it hard from the first mile. Chilton's insightful when he says, "This is what it must have been like to drive a new Dino in 1970, next to heavy dinosaurs like the Daytona." You can lean on the front end without fear regardless of road surface or camber. It's thrilling and relaxing all at once.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

There's no disguising that the word "road," in the context of the Viper, should always be followed immediately by "course."

But not all is perfect. The rear wing makes odd airplane noises in crosswinds and it completely blocks my rear vision. Furthermore, Porsche's traditionally stingy approach to standard equipment is reflected in the fact that this $104,815 car doesn't have auto temperature controls. Also, what kind of world do we live in when a mid-engined Ferrari has a more spacious and usable cockpit than a mid-engined Porsche?

I finish the day with the AMG GT S. Okulski's scathing on the subject of the long-hood Mercedes: "Everything feels exaggerated and manufactured, more like a program than an analog device." I prefer to think of it as simply low-effort and pleasant. Very fast, easy to drive, brilliant interior. The whole thing feels like it's milled from a single billet of high-quality aluminum. What it does not do is inspire any particular desire, other than the desire to merely own one. As a former 560SL owner, I quite like it, but it's not summoning much enthusiasm among my peers. Not to worry. Tomorrow we'll evaluate these cars all over again, on the long front straight of NCM.

THE TRACK

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

NCM MOTORSPORTS PARK

Although NCM is across I-65 from the National Corvette Museum, it's not a Playskool track for parading Vette owners. Artfully laid out on a compact 210-acre parcel of Kentucky red clay, NCM is fast, long, challenging, and endlessly entertaining, a refreshing break from the typical overly cautious—read: boring—new track. Le Mans racers, recognizing its similarity to the Circuit de la Sarthe, even test here. We ran a 2.9-mile configuration with 19 turns for our evaluation.

I'M NOT A NERVOUS PASSENGER, but when SRT's Chris Winkler shifts into fifth at the same place I normally hit the brakes and turns what I consider a 110-mph right-hander into a 135-mph no-brake right-hander by hucking the steering wheel of the Viper ACR as hard as he can and letting the massive rear wing sort out the stability, I have to work very hard not to vomit. Nominally speaking, the man is here to put on the front splitter and air the tires, but it seemed churlish to not let him show off his new toy for us.

"The process can be more violent than most people are used to," Winkler notes without the slightest bit of irony to his tone, "but with the wide Kumho virtual race slicks and all the aero grip available, it's typically the fastest way around." When it's my turn to drive the ACR, I simply cannot do what Winkler does. My brain won't let me. It cannot believe in the wing.

Yet I'm still faster in the Viper than I am in anything else, and so is the boss man, who turns a 1:58.14 in his sessions without too much hassle. The Bentley brings up the rear of our group, at 2:10.66. Everything else is somewhere in between. Although all eight of us are driving each car on track, only Webster is running a timer. This is to prevent some of us from crashing and to prevent others of us (ahem) from voting the impersonal verdict of the stopwatch.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

We have two days at NCM to drive the cars and choose our favorites, but before twilight calls time on our first evening, the pit lane has already acquired a distinct reality-television atmosphere as each of us tries to form alliances and kick some cars off the island, so to speak.

There's Team Ferrari, headed by Mr. Webster. "Best autobox I've ever had on the track… . Love how the Ferrari responds to trail braking… . The aero cars do too much for the driver. The Ferrari is looser, easier to slide, and makes you think about where you're putting the weight of the car. It is," he concludes, "the car I'd take to the grave." Around NCM, the 488 can be effortlessly coaxed into long one-handed drifts, but I wish it had more front-end steady-state grip.

Team Mustang is led by Colin Comer: "It has soul. You can't help but love it. Like the '12–'13 Boss 302 but just that much better. Is there a car here that punches more above its weight than the GT350R?" Part of it is due to suspension setup. The high negative camber really pays off on track. I expected that. What I did not expect was the way the light flywheel and carbon-fiber wheels conspire to make the car feel inertia-free in a straight line. It seems to violate the laws of physics. Bowman: "This and the Viper are the cars that make you want to be a better driver."

Cayman GT4 dances through right-left combinations with poise. Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

The Cayman has DeMatio and Smith as devoted fans. "This car is everything for me. It instantly tripled my confidence level at NCM," DeMatio gushes. "Made me feel like every other lap I did today was a mere warm-up." Meanwhile, young Smith is trying to convince me that the Cayman can be tossed into the first big right-hander almost flat. But with my considerable bulk in the car, the tail steps out, and the Porsche Stability Management saves the bacon that the midmounted inertia had been cooking up for us. "Try it yourself," Smith growls. But I'm not interested.

I'm busy leading Team Viper. It's the fastest car here, the most demanding to drive and yet the most rewarding when it's pushed close to its limits. The learning curve is steep, true, but you'd feel really good about yourself when you reached the top. Chilton agrees: "Looks like a race car and feels like one. It's also the only car that felt like it could keep on lapping hour after hour."

Nothing mellow about this yellow: Z06 brings big power, big grip, big aero to track duty. Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

That last is a pointed aside about the GT350R and Z06, which are showing some scary temperatures on their displays. That said, the Ford and Chevy are far more accessible to novices. "I can't believe how the Corvette harnesses so much horsepower with such ease," says Webster. "That's the real achievement here." Likewise with the Ford. If you owned the GT350R and the Viper, you'd be faster in the Mustang for a long time. Maybe forever, if the idea of using the steering wheel as a brake at triple-digit speeds doesn't appeal.

None of us expect the Bentley to be a hero on the track, and predictably, even the massive eight-piston front brakes can't arrest the two-and-a-half-ton weight for long. It's slow in this company, but don't kid yourself: A Miata would never see which way the GT3-R went, on track or off. The ATS-V is not only faster than the Bentley, with a 2:08.15 time, but it's far more comfortable in its skin out there. "Great brakes, chuckable," quoth Pinto.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

It's the AMG that is truly an enigma. Faster than the Cayman by dint of sheer massive motivation from the twin turbochargers mounted inside the vee of the cylinders, and capable of threatening the Mustang despite having nothing like that car's chassis balance, it nevertheless has no ardent fans. Remembering how hard I campaigned for the SLS Black Series to win the inaugural, 2014 PCOTY, I can't help but think that the same gonzo wings-and-wheels formula, applied here, might make the GT S lovable enough to triumph in a future contest.

At the end of the second day, after impassioned dinner-table speeches and plenty of hushed but heated arguments around pit lane, it's time for the vote. We can each distribute 25 points across as many cars as we like, but we can't give more than 10 points to any particular one, and we can give only one vehicle 10 points. Everyone's quiet as road test editor Robin Warner does his tally.

And then there were four:

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

The Corvette Z06 arrived at PCOTY as heir apparent to the Z51 Stingray's decisive win in 2014. Yet about half of us like the standard Corvette more than the special-reserve version. Blame the supercharger, which endows this car with massive pace yet removes some of the involvement from back-road driving.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

The Ferrari 488 GTB starts at $245,400, and our tester—featuring a $12,485 paint job, $10,798 racing seats, and expensive carbon-fiber trim inside and out—rang in at $347,942. Listen: it's worth every penny. It beats an Enzo around Ferrari's test track, and on the back roads of rural Tennessee, it's capable of warping space and time. It's better at being a sports car than the Corvette is, and it's almost better at being a luxury car than the Bentley is, particularly if your idea of "luxury" involves catching the eye of potential bedmates. It's almost too good; one suspects that if it leaked some oil, it might have won PCOTY, because those of us who like to wrench on cars could relate to what is otherwise a perfected machine.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

Any time you're feeling depressed about the state of the world today, just remember that the Viper ACR exists, that there is actually a functioning corporation out there willing to give the green light to the consumer sale of what is essentially an FIA GT racer. Don't think of it as a traditional performance car. Think of it as a four-wheeled Suzuki GSX-R1000 with slightly more wet-weather capability and nontrivially lower lap times. It's probably the most thoroughly track-developed car ever sold to the public, and somehow along the way it became something that rank novices could drive and enjoy safely at exuberant speeds.

THE WINNER

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

AROUND NCM MOTORSPORTS PARK, the Ford Shelby GT350R feels very nearly as special as the Viper ACR. It has the same single-minded focus on high-speed balance and usable performance, and if it sometimes feels a bit like a taxicab compared with the Viper, it makes up for that with a simply magical V-8 that brings the caviar thrills of 8250-rpm performance to a beer-and-burgers demographic. If you could summon some sort of Lovecraftian dark magic to combine the best parts of the other seven cars in this test—the Bentley's on-road poise, the Cadillac's vivacious chassis, the Merc's bluff-nosed retro charm, the Cayman's accessible limits, the Ferrari's auditory drama, the Corvette's wide-hipped machismo, and the Viper's sense of purpose—then what would appear in the swirling mists would be, not Cthulhu the Great Old One, but Shelby the Baddest Mustang. Our winner by a runaway vote, the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R is, quite deservedly, the Road & Track 2016 Performance Car of the Year.

Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan

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