At Sport Compact Car, we pride ourselves on having perspective. You know, a sense of reality rooted in a solid foundation of car-guy geekdom. After all, without a broad range of experiences, data and testing to draw from, it's hard to know with any certainty that our opinions are legitimate and that what we say is really true.
This level of detail has, for years, trickled down to neurotic information design in the pages of Sport Compact Car. For example, back in the olden days when Geek-at-Large Coleman came up with the scale for our dyno charts, he based the size of each horsepower on reality. And the reality of the day meant it was unlikely for any sport compact car to make 500 hp. So he designed a chart that would fill the page height at about that number. And at that height, using an 8000-rpm width, the chart would fit with enough room to run text on the same page.
That means that one horsepower has always been the exact same height from issue to issue, year after year. In other words, you can compare the shape and size of the dyno charts SCC printed in 1997 with the ones we printed last month and know that you're making a genuine comparison.
In fact, it wasn't until the December 2004 issue that former editor Oldham, in a fit of neurosis, forced me to extend the chart to 9000 rpm (something we only do now if power delivery necessitates it). He didn't like running the dyno trace for Paul Walker's Skyline off the end of the graph, even though the car quit making power well before 8000 rpm.
Regardless, this logical, smart information design has served us well enough over the years that there's been no reason to change it.
Until now.
Nowadays, every EVO or WRX drag car makes 500 hp. Every modified 350Z comes close. And, not surprisingly, every MK IV Supra that hasn't been stored in a museum will peg our dated dyno charts. The solution, until now, has been to cut a few hundred horsepower from the bottom of the chart. But do that with a 1,000-hp Supra and you get a very small picture of the car's power delivery.
So we've done some tweaking. It won't be permanent tweaking since we don't plan to feature 1,000-hp Supras every month, but the massive power of this month's cover cars requires a temporary change.
At 1,339 hp, the AAP Supra is the most powerful car for which we've ever built a dyno chart. At that power level using our usual scale, the dyno chart would need to be about three times our page height (10.75 inches), making it rather self-defeating. Plus, it would be a uselessly vertical line that doesn't allow for any comparison.
To create some perspective, we've scaled it to fit this page but retained the same aspect ratio (height-to-width relationship) we usually use to give you a sense of how ridiculously powerful this car is and how hard it is to find a reasonable way to express this much power in any relevant way.
Also on this page is the same dyno chart using the aspect ratio we've chosen for all four Supra cover cars. Both charts have our Project 350Z included for perspective. And, in both cases, the Supra dwarfs the Z. But in the new chart you get some sense for how high the AAP car revs and where its power is actually being made. And, naturally, being a drag car, it makes all its power up high. There isn't an engine making nearly 450 hp/liter that doesn't have a similar power delivery.
I say all this only to show you how critical it is to present this information in an-easy-to-understand format. When we make a change to something as important as a dyno chart, we don't make it arbitrarily. After all, without perspective none of this matters.
Next month, the dyno charts return to normal. Promise.