Breaking barriers

I have been road testing cars for almost a decade now. In that time, there have been some memorable cars and some that I’d rather forget. As expected, I am always keen to lay my hands on a performance car, something that promises impressive straight-line figures as well as great dynamics. Over the past few years there have been some searingly quick cars launched onto the market but many have evaded me.

The Bugatti Veyron comes to mind as do some other near-unpronounceable exotics. The Bugatti stands out as it’s not only one of the fastest cars in the world, with a top speed in excess of 430 km/h, but also one of the quickest accelerating, too. Tests have yielded 0-100 km/h in a scant 2,5 seconds. That’s an astounding figure when you consider that it weighs over 1,8 tonnes. The chances of road testing the world’s fastest car are slim to none. I once rode shotgun in a Veyron here in Cape Town but somehow just could not convince the owner to let me have a go behind the wheel; funny that…

Testing times

I recall the day that I tested a car that broke into the three-second barrier for the benchmark sprint. We had driven nine supercars, well eight plus a bakkie, to Port Elizabeth for CAR’s annual Performance Shootout. At Aldo Scribante racetrack I took up the task of performance testing all the vehicles. The track has a drag strip and we used the staging area to start our standing-start sprint runs.

Road-test engineer Peter Palm and I worked our way up the power stakes and left the Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 for the very end. When you have tested dozens of cars that can break the five-second barrier they all start to feel rather tame.

Launched

When we jumped into the littlest Lambo we knew that it was going to be quick but we were not prepared for what came next. With the car’s launch control system activated I let rip from standstill. A brief snip of that clip can be seen here and below. The revs dialled up and when I released the brake pedal it felt as though we had been hit from behind by a large truck.

The four Pirelli Corsa boots clawed into the track surface and slingshotted us down the strip at a major rate of knots. The gear shifts thumped through the monocoque with a ferocity that is seldom felt in a road car. The single-clutch R tronic system doesn’t smooth out shifts like a twin-clutch version does.

Usually Mr Palm calls out times per speed increment as we perform an acceleration run, but as they came and went on our Vbox display faster than he could read them aloud he didn’t bother. He just called the 100 km/h time: THREE COMMA EIGHT NINE was the shout above the 5,2-litre V10 revving to its extremities. It was the quickest I had gone to 100 km/h to that point in my life and, significantly, we broke firmly into the sub four-second bracket.

Most automakers test in ideal conditions on a high-grip surface with a light fuel load and one occupant. So, on the odd occasion when we don’t manage to achieve the manufacturer’s claimed figure it is easily explained. We managed to better Lambo’s claimed timed by 1/100th of a second.

Quicker still

Since that fateful day we have scooted to 100 km/h in less than four seconds on a number of occasions and even dipped below the 3,5-second mark (Porsche 997 Turbo S, Nissan GT-R, McLaren MP4-12c). With several modern super- and hypercars boasting sub three-second zero-to-100 km/h times, I can’t wait to break through another milestone in the not too distant future.