Performance COTY

PCOTY 2016: The Track

Circuit work cements the final order as some cars flourish and others flounder

19 Apr 2016 5:44 PM

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When you get to my age, it takes a fair bit to surprise a bloke. You start to think maybe you’ve seen it all before. And then something happens that makes you realise that you don’t know the half of it.

Take DC’s racing helmet, for instance. Now, god knows I’m no fashionista. In fact, I’m the sort of bloke who thinks a catwalk is what you attempt when you’re sneaking home at three in the morning.

But even I know that a helmet shouldn’t sit way up on top of your scone for a result that resembles a pair of humpin’ pumpkins. Clearly, Campbell – bless him – is not aware of this.

The accepted PCOTY wisdom (an oxymoron if ever there was) is to start tackling the curly little Winton layout in the tiddlers first. This has two main results. First, it allows you to get your eye in, in something that is less likely to tear your head off and eat it.

Anybody left blowing smoke rings at the news that the Mazda MX-5 turned in the slowest lap time needs to recalibrate. Of course, it was always going to be that way. I mean, the MX-5 gives away a full 279kW to either the Jag or the GT S, and even the little Peugeot has 57kW (about 60 per cent more) than the wee Mazda. Not that Winton is a total grunt circuit, but, hey, everything has its limits.

The Peugeot was next with a time that was a good five seconds faster than the Mazda, and it did so by having the grunt to stretch out on the straight bits, as well as the short wheelbase that makes it such an effective car to rotate at the apex.

Given the sheer grunt of the Falcon XR8, you might have expected it to fare a bit better on the track. But, as we’ve discovered more than once, the supercharged V8 not only gives the Falc serious squirt, it also has the ability to show the chassis up as being pretty long in the tooth.

Still, it was only about a second behind the new Commodore SS Redline, and that did surprise us a bit. Okay, so the SS doesn’t have the shift of the XR8, but in every other regard it’s a sharper thing to punt hard. Felt it, too.

I’m doubtful anybody is ever going to buy a hybrid as a track-day car, even one like the i8. For a start, when it inevitably runs out of battery power about half way ’round the first lap, you have a problem. Also, the quest for fuel efficiency has led BMW to under-tyre the thing (in a performance car sense), so its grip is limited.

It mightn’t exactly be a cheap little hot-hatch, but in the context of some of the price-tags here this year, the Megane is a car that punches w-a-y above its weight. To be fair, though, if it hadn’t done well on the track, it would have been marked pretty harshly, because that’s clearly what it has been designed and built for.

Now here’s the surprise packet of PCOTY 2016. Not only did the Lexus surprise us on the road for its blend of pace and refinement, it blew our doors off on the track where it turned its back on decades of Lexus tradition and actually enjoyed itself.

AMGs have traditionally been great road cars and somewhat compromised track cars. Which is fine, given AMG owners would admit that doesn’t matter much to them. But the twin-turbo V8 now fitted to the new C63 platform has made us think twice about that assumption.

The big debate regarding the Jaguar F-Type Coupe R was whether the move to all-wheel drive would do it any favours. Perhaps, in the context of a racetrack, it could have even been counterproductive.

It’s no secret we like the new AMG GT S much more than the old SLS on which it’s kinda based. And when it can lap Winton 1.4 seconds faster than the SLS, we like the new guy even more. Its corner speed was right up there, as was its v-max (duh). More than that, though, it feels alive when you hit the hotmix.

The only thing that was ever a likely chance to hose the AMG was, of course, the GT3 Porker. And man, did it ever. In fact, the GT3’s 1:30.9 not only trounced the AMG by more than a second-and-a-half, it also hosed every other previous PCOTY entrant – living or dead – around Winton.