Each of these cars brings a level of performance for the price, and we went down to the MMRT in Chennai to find out how much of a step-up in performance do these cars offer.
As far as cliches are concerned, the old saying that money can’t buy happiness does not apply to automobiles. Car manufacturers spend a whole lot of money, time and effort developing and testing performance cars and then demand princely sums for you to enjoy the fruits of their labour. At various price points, various cars exist in the performance genre that provide different levels of performance. Why can’t a hot hatch go as quick as a full-blown supercar? Well, usually that is because these cars need to exist within certain boundaries, defined by purpose, price and other factors.
The three cars you see here — the Volkswagen Polo GTI, Volvo S60 Polestar and the Lamborghini Huracan — are performance cars, each representing a specific level of performance. The GTI is your quintessential hot hatch – fast, nimble and packed with enough power to shame many a sedan. The Volvo S60 Polestar is a sedan that has enough space for you to pack in friends or family, and treat them to the theatre of speed. And finally, the Lamborghini Huracan is the ultimate when it comes to sheer speed and performance. A car that in today’s age of everything turbocharged (like the GTI and S60 Polestar here) is the flagbearer of a big, naturally aspirated engine. Each of these cars has a unique perspective and our aim is not to compare them against each other but to understand what each of them does with what they have and where in a scheme of things positions them.
The fast and entertaining MMRT in Chennai was our playground for the day, and we invited three of India’s leading racing drivers – Rayomand Banajee, Aditya Patel and Karthik Tharani – to put these cars through their paces, and help us understand what performance means. This is what we discovered.
Volkswagen Polo GTI
LAP TIMES 02:04.8
Price: ₹19.99 lakh, ex-showroom
This story is from the September 2017 edition of Overdrive.
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This story is from the September 2017 edition of Overdrive.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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