Motor Trend: After years of trying, we’ve finally fulfilled editor-at-large Angus MacKenzie’s dream of getting 12 of the best-driving cars on sale in the U.S. together in one test. They come from all backgrounds, from the affordable Ford Focus ST to the stately Bentley Continental GT Speed to the absolutely wild SRT Viper. But how do we compare such diverse competitors?
I often tell anyone who’ll listen that there are two kinds of car people: numbers people and experience people. For numbers people, data is everything, and a car that produces the highest or lowest numbers in the greatest number of categories is therefore the best. For experience people, it’s all about how the car drives and how good it makes you feel behind the wheel. As they say, lap times only truly matter if they’re putting food on your table. Best Driver’s Car is a bridge between these two factions. We subject every competitor to our regular battery of instrumented tests and an all-out hot lap at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca at the hands of one of the winningest drivers in America, Randy Pobst. We collect more data about how the cars behave than we do in any other comparison test, but the numbers inform our decision rather than dictate it. As MacKenzie is fond of saying, if numbers were all that mattered, we’d test an F1 car and be done with it.
Read more:
http://www.motortrend.com/features/performance/1311_2013_motor_trend_best_drivers_car/
