Wheels Handling Olympics 2007 Pt.1

Wheels Handling Olympics 2007:
The contenders

Wheels Magazine
July, 2007

GAME ON!
But first, let's get a handle on handling...

'Handling' is probably the most semantically promiscuous term in the automotive lexicon. With (possibly) equal validity it spans the gulf between an arbitrary punt around the block, and the F1 engineer's distillation of hard data gigabytes. Clearly, the Wheels Handling Olympics lies somewhere between the two - hopefully closer to the latter than the former.

People have pronounced views on handling. As one reader recently suggested: "If you can notice the difference on public roads, you're driving too bloody fast anyway."

Perhaps you share this view. If so, stop reading now. The rest of this report will be irrelevant. Everyone else: sit down, strap in, and start salivating because the Wheels Handling Olympics is all about cranking the volume up past '11', grinding the shoulders off a pallet-load of high-performance tyres and driving way too bloody fast - continuously, in some of the world's most relevant performance cars - in the name of science.

We plumb the limits of high-performance handling, at conventional road speeds (for relevance), and do the kinds of things you cannot do on public roads - like hang on in a corner for three full 360-degree circular on-limit laps. Try finding a place out in the 'real world' where it's possible to corner safely on the limit, continuously, for 30 seconds.

It's a game of balancing acts. The first is played out between each car's performance and its endurance. The trick is to get each car to its limit, and measure it there, without killing it. It's easy to litter a race circuit with lunched brakes and shredded tyres, but doing so is hardly a recipe for meaningful results. Even if it were, would a contest played out at 200km/h be relevant to readers in a country in which the maximum permissible speed is 110?

The second balancing act is between objectivity (the numbers) and subjectivity (how the car feels). Both are relevant and valid assessments. In the real Olympics, for example, the brilliant feats of a gymnast may be distilled to a subjective score by a panel of expert judges, while the 100-metre hurdles is exclusively a numbers game - and yet both gold medals are equally credible. Wheels' road tests combine both measures, but are intrinsically skewed to the subjective because in the final analysis every car is substantially more than the sum of its on-limit performances.

The space here for subjectivity - what the driver thought - is limited to 10 percent. The balance of 90 percent is made up exclusively of numbers derived from stringently controlled tests (you might interpret this to read: two days of meaningful thrashings in hot cars not encumbered by the burden of personal ownership).

The Wheels Handling Olympics might not be completely relevant to the real world. It is, however, definitive ... as well as impossibly, ridiculously therapeutic.

THE CULLING FIELD
Our contenders are drawn from experience and expedience. Experience told us that the sub-$24K Suzuki Swift Sport wouldn't win, but was a worthwhile inclusion because it represented the most affordable car out there with some degree of handling elan about it.

The $224K Porsche 911 Carrera S marks the upper end of the relevance horizon. We had intended to cap the field at $200K, at which point the base-model $198K Carrera scrapes in. That's where expedience kicked in - Porsche told us a base model wasn't available. So the Carrera S, with an extra 22kW/30Nm and 25kg, finds itself at the helm of the field.

Another unavailable was the $63K HSV Clubsport R8, which would have allowed a comparison between standard dampers and the GTS's hi-tech MRC units.

The wish-list also ran to a Mercedes-Benz E63, which is line-ball on price with the 911 Carrera S - and with 378kW/630Nm outputs in an AMG-tweaked 1995kg platforem, could have given the 260kW/400Nm/1420kg Porsche a run for its money. Unfortunately for us, it seems pesky, well-heeled customers keep buying them.

Last unavailable was the punchy RenaultSport Megane 225 Cup - a pity, seeing as track work might have presented the ideal setting for its excellent suspension and outputs to shine.

The Commodore Omega is here as a benchmark. The ahndling of the most popular variatn of Australia's most popular car provides the perfect context against which this field of talented handlers may be judged.

THE CONTENDERS:
The contenders Sixteen hero handlers from under $24K to over $220K - plus one Holden Commodore Omega - make up our field this year. Here's how they stack up on price.

SETTLING THE SCORE
Armed with new technology, thanks to Bill Gates and the US Department of Defence - plus some really smart chaps in the UK and Sweden - we have further improved our data gathering and scoring system over last year's Handling Olympics. Result? Greater clarity about which cars are capable of what, when. Here's how it all comes together.

1. LAP-BASED TESTS: 50%
The figure-of-eight North Circuit of Oran Park, mapped by GPS, is 935 metres long, with four turns, two straights (the main is 200m) and a kinked flyover. This is a place that doesn't kill road cars - at least not quickly. The fastest car in the field managed a bit over 140km/h down the main straight, which meant the braking was well within the cars' capabilities. (Braking from 200km/h involves twice as much energy.) A lap is representative of everything a car does under the heading 'handling'. That, and our newfound ability to carve it into its component parts, is why we gave it a big chunk of the score.

• Lap Time: 10%
  Lap time with a twist. Using a GPS - and accelerometer-based Race Technology AX22 vehicle performance computer and data logger (phew), we divided the circuit into seven segments. The software then assembled the best theoretical lap by selecting the seven quickest segments from several laps. Driver Peter McKay's brief was to keep punting until he knew he had it nailed. Four laps usually did it.

• The Straights: 20%
  Speed on the straights depends on grip (more grip means a higher exit speed from the preceding corner entering the straight), grunt (because once the corner is past, the job at hand is to accelerate), and brakes (because better brakes means you have more time to accelerate before the next corner). The main straight was the hero - we gave it 10 percent. The short straight and the flyover were awarded five percent apiece.

• The Turns: 20%
  Four turns for 20 percent of the total meant five percent apiece. We took the best segment of each turn and measured the average speed between entry and exit markers. Other analysis - entry speed, exit speed, mid-corner speed - was convoluted, as well as not representative of the true performance differences between the cars. Some were hotter going in; slower coming out, and vice-versa ...

2. MAX LATERAL G-FORCE: 10%
A favourite for measuring absolute grip, but forget the stopwatch; that was so 20th century. A trackside infrared beam triggered a portable lap timer suction-cupped to the car window. The car cornered flat out, continuously, for three laps of a 22-metre radius circle. Call it 50km/h, heeled well over, counter-clockwise (so you didn't have to be Clark Kent to see through the driver's side A-pillar to scope the cones marking the inner circle). We downloaded all three laps, checked for consistency, and selected the best one. Everything else was eyes-glaze-over simple: mathematically convert to reach lateral g-force.

3. SLALOM: 10%
Upset by constant change? Don't become a slalom test driver, then. The slalom tested the car's ability to throw its inertia about the place with composure. It's a game exclusively of swerve-avoid-recover, past nine cones at 14-metre intervals, with a 40km/h rolling start. New procedures for 2007? No stopwatch; no more U-turns. Infrared beams at each end and a timer onboard in the car allowed us to just concentrate on the business end of slaloming. Two or three runs were performed, depending on consistency. The best went into the back pocket for 10 percent of the total score.

4. ACCELERATION 0-100km/h: 10%
Zero to "but officer ... " No handling test would be complete without it. If handling is all about the grip demands placed on tyres (and it is) then these come in three flavours: cornering, braking and accelerating. News ed Sean Poppitt drove, while James Whitbourn juggled Vbox and laptop. Easy stuff for the driver; a real motion-sickness inducer for the head-down operator - doubly so seeing as the braking tests were done back-to-back with acceleration. At half time, and lighter by the mass of one lunch, James briefed Lachlan Mansell on the esoterica of Vbox operation, and went off for a well deserved lie-down.

5. BRAKING 100km/h-0: 10%
Braking commenced at 110km/h and by the time 100km/h was reached, ABS was fully active and the driver merely a spectator waiting for the scenery to stop (with Vbox recording the data, naturally). This process is contrived to remove human frailty from the test, and the requirement to brake from a precise speed, or hit 18 different pedals exactly the same way. All that was required was to stop on approximately the same section of track. Two runs were performed, and they had to be within 0.5 metres of each other or the process continued until they were. The two were averaged in the final assessment.

6. DRIVER ASSESSMENT: 10%
A hefty responsibility for the hired gun we call the Silver Fox. Yep, while Peter McKay's assessment was numerically small, it could still sink or float a contender. His assessment was all about on-limit demeanour. No 'comfort' or 'cupholder' critiques allowed here. McKay was given a free hand beyond that, and elected to score the cars as follows: 50 percent for the track, 25 percent apiece for the circle and the slalom. (And if you don't like the thought of any subjectivity whatsoever in the results, we presented the results with and without McKay's take in the final analysis.)

The Wheels Handling Olympics track is at Oran Park Raceway, an hour south-west of Sydney.

Read more on the Wheels Handling Olympics:

Pt.2 - Rankings: Where the contenders ranked and why ...