If you're into building performance cars, there has probably been a time when you had to either put up or shut up. It might have been as you left a green light a half-beat faster than the guy next to you, or when someone rolled up next to you on the freeway begging for you to drop a gear and go. But the only true way of knowing how well your car works is by doing quantitative testing because, as we all know, the numbers don't lie!
However, there are a great many things that will affect those numbers, such as driver experience, tire composition, track conditions, and more. What KIT CAR has tried to do with our kit testing (our last one was published in the July '04 issue) is get a general feel for what a particular car can do, and see how it compares with other kits and "regular" cars.
For that we rent the south side of the California Speedway facility in Fontana, California, to do our testing. The quartermile course is the same used by drag racers from all over the country, and we use a portion of the flat asphalt parking lot for our brake, slalom, and skidpad testing.
The quartermile is self-explanatory: It's 1,320 feet long, and we see how fast a car will accelerate in different increments (see chart) as well as achieve a top speed/time. The brake test is done at two increments (30-0 and 60-0), but both are recorded on the same run. The slalom is a set of seven cones set 70 feet apart for a total distance of 420 feet. Time through the cones (without knocking one down) also yields mph. The skidpad is a 200-foot-diameter circle, and the car is run counterclockwise on the outside edge of the circle and then clockwise on the inside edge of the circle. Those times are averaged through a formula to get the amount of g-force generated by the car.
Brian Setters, owner of the 718 RSK tested here, not only drove his car for the first time at this test, but had never done any type of driving like this before. But despite his lack of experience, he turned in some respectable times, and Brian would be the first to say it's owed to the car Thunder Ranch built (and featured on the preceding pages).
To get the lowdown on this car's engine, suspension, and tires, check the previous story. Every car is different, so don't read too much into the final tally-the numbers are more for general discussion rather than drawing lines in the sand! The testing itself is very time-consuming, which is why you don't see as many tests in KIT CAR as we'd like, but we're working on that. And on that note, if any manufacturer would like to bring their car out for a day of real-world track testing, give us a call and make it happen!