TRACK

A CLOSED COURSE IS THE ONLY WAY TO APPROACH THE LIMITS OF AN UNBELIEVABLY HIGH-PERFORMANCE FIELD.

- BY MIKE AUSTIN

Once again, Performance Car of the Year starts at the track, a return to Thunderhill Raceway Park. The confines of a circuit are a chance to safely explore a car's limits, a frontier that is increasingly extreme. In this year's lineup, we had five cars with more than 600 hp, including one with more than 1000. That qualifies as extreme.

We time laps, but those numbers don't factor into our subjective voting, except indirectly as a way to formulate our own performance-to-confidence equations. There is no such thing as a perfect lap, and these are not pure race cars. They are road cars first and foremost, but ones that might be occasionally tracked by owners. That's the experience we came to Thunderhill to replicate, with me pushing each car as far as I was comfortable doing to set a representative time. A professional racer would be faster—but for the most part, these cars aren't being bought by pro racers.

More important than the times were the feelings behind the wheel and the thoughts on each car shared in notebooks, discussions, and occasional arguments. There wasn't always consensus, but one common theme from this year was just how unscary even the heavy hitters were to push hard. Power outputs are rising to unprecedented levels, but drivability is keeping up.

There was still drama. The fact that the Mustang GTD managed to put any score on the board is a small miracle. The first timed lap ended with a loud thunk and a rearview mirror filled with transmission-fluid smoke. A half-shaft had popped out of the gearbox. With a trailer full of spares and a trip to a nearby Ford dealer, the GTD's handlers from Multimatic pulled off a heroic fix in less than three hours. During two days on track, our contender cars went through many sets of tires and a couple hundred gallons of fuel, but nothing else broke.