In case you didn't notice, the winner of our 2020 Performance Car of the Year title was not the fastest, quickest, or most powerful car in the competition. There's a reason for that: We believe that numbers don't tell you everything about a car. And further, we think that chasing ever-improving numbers is ruining performance cars. Sam Smith explains:

Some time ago, at a road course few people visit, far from prying ears, I stood in a paddock garage and listened to an engineer from a major carmaker lay out a truth.



"We only care about numbers," he said, "because you guys care about numbers."

"Us guys?"

"Car magazines."

"Performance numbers, you mean?"

"Yep."

My brain did a brief and strange little dance of glee.

"Come on. Are you telling me that your employer, [global manufacturer of fine repute and engineering might], would consciously make a new sports car slower than its predecessor, on purpose?"

"Yes. Maybe. But first we’d have to know that the press wouldn’t crucify us for it."

And thus, to borrow a line from Monty Python, we witness the violence in the system.

Cars have always sold on improvement. You know the ad line: "Today’s model is better/faster/stronger than yesterday’s, so ditch your 2015 Toyolet 2000 SUX and get the 2020 Toyolet 4000 SUX!" How could you not want more of what you wanted before? And partly as a result, new cars have long grown more powerful every year. People like fast.

This makes sense. Along with the fact that, for a time, this process also gave rise to an ever-increasing sense of driver control—engineering advancement, in the interest of helping ordinary, non-racing-driver people handle more potent machinery. Prior to the advent of the computer-monitored chassis, that control generally came in the form of added steering feel, suspension refinement, grip, and braking. And so a 1980s BMW 3-series was faster and quieter than a 1970s 3-series but just as lively and talkative, and a C5 Corvette similarly topped a C4, and so on. Car magazines came to verify those qualities through performance testing, quantifying talents such as acceleration and skidpad handling. In addition to providing an objective barometer, the process helped us call "rat" when manufacturer ad copy inflated reality.

So we cared, perhaps too much at times, about numbers. And carmakers cared back, and the gyre widened. Possibly into oblivion.

Somewhere along the line, the limits of most new cars exceeded those of public pavement. Regulatory needs made vehicles fatter and more distant. Tire technology hit remarkable heights. And then we arrived at the present, where the landscape of sports and exotic cars is so defined by extreme performance that some of our favorite new cars don’t have a pulse until double the posted limit. If the average 1990s sport sedan or exotic gives a bubbly stream of back-road feedback at speed x, its 2019 twin needs 2x or maybe even 3x to wake up the same way.

Restraint can be entertaining—keeping a 1970s Hemi Cuda from killing you is a hoot, for example. The problem is one of execution. Too many modern cars are dead fish at the wheel, long-legged and asleep at normal velocity, ill-suited to how people actually drive. They’re the product of engineers aiming at closed-course laps or a percentage gain on some spreadsheet, á la race cars. But fast road cars aren’t race cars, where tenths of a second matter. On real roads, fun is second only to safety and emissions.

We occasionally meet engineers who argue. Fun is speed, they insist, full stop. And in some cases, it is. But that equation only takes you so far. If performance perpetually trumped involvement, the world would beg for 5000-hp automated cars that perform like roller coasters: Strap in, hold on, and give up control. And what is a love of driving if not control in the exercise of freedom?

A McLaren F1 rips and snorts through landscape in a way a Bugatti Chiron never will, and the Chiron is an order of magnitude quicker. A Honda Civic Type R will dust a Jaguar E-type, but only one of them pours a cocktail of grace and tactility that can change your life. Do you want a 1200-hp exotic, stability-tamed and distant below 1 g, or a live-wire car that requires you to be present and caffeinated on a 40-mph back road? How often does the average person visit a track, really? Do you want to ride to 60 mph in three seconds or drive there in five?

Progress is human. Give us machines that are safer, more durable, lighter, more approachable at their limits, cleaner, and more efficient. Build them every day for the next hundred years and no one will complain. The numbers are a piece of the puzzle, not the whole. It’s time to walk away from letting them dictate the fast-car business. To exit the stage where a quicker Nürburgring time or another 50 hp automatically deems a machine better in some misguided crowdthink fashion. To remember that how always tops how much.

Except, of course, with the unmeasurables—sound, steering feedback, styling genius, the joy you get when a great chassis cracks into a corner on a winding road. The intangibles that make you walk away from a car in the parking lot, looking back every five feet, glad to be alive. With those, there is no ceiling.

Hallelujah.



This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io