HEAT SEEKERS

KNOCKING ON THE 10-SECOND BRACKET AS WE TEST ACCELERATION AND BRAKING ON THE BEND’S 1KM-LONG FRONT STRAIGHT

- SCOOT NEWMAN

THE BEND’S long, long main straight is a happy place for performance testing. A smooth, grippy surface and plenty of rubber laid down by numerous tyre-burning race starts makes for, in general, fast times.

But first, an embarrassing confession: Morley and I had completed all the cars only to discover the Driftboxes didn’t have data-saving memory cards in them. While the numbers had been written down, the Driftbox only displays figures to one decimal place rather than the two it records to, so we hastily grabbed our helmets and re-ran all the cars in double-quick time in order to obtain accurate figures. Thankfully, due to our earlier ‘practice’ runs, despite the haste we managed to match the earlier figures to within a tenth. So without further ado, in alphabetical order, this is the class of PCOTY 2020.

The Alfa Romeo Stelvio Q doesn’t look like your standard athlete, but a 375kW/600Nm 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6 provides plenty of motivation, while all-wheel drive rockets the Italian SUV to 100km/h in just 3.79sec and through the quarter-mile in 11.95sec at 191.50km/h. Yep, an SUV running sub-12sec quarters. It makes a suitably throaty six-cylinder growl in the process and stops remarkably well too, pulling up from 100km/h in just 35.6m.