My reality is damaged. My understanding of basic physics has been challenged, my confidence in my abilities as a driver has eroded and my respect for the rally drivers of the Group B era has been elevated to religious levels. I have driven the Bozz Performance Lancer, and it is stupid.
So stupid, in fact, that more than a month after driving it, I still have a stupid grin on my face just thinking about it. It was, quite frankly, more than I could handle. I think I could learn, with a lot of practice, how to drive it reasonably well. If I ate well, exercised, got lots of sleep and then drank a few bottles of Red Bull, I could probably accelerate my reactions to the frenetic speed required to keep up with this car on pavement. But think about this: At their peak, the Group B rally cars were making this much power, and their drivers were handling it on narrow dirt roads swarming with escaped mental patients. How they managed it, I will never understand.
Trying to communicate the experience of driving such a car into a few hundred inspirational words is a monumental challenge (one which our man, Shiv Pathak, has tackled on page 122) but for you to actually believe our pseudo-maniacal ravings, we needed numbers. Imagine my disappointment then, when the Lancer only managed a single, botched quarter-mile run. During the second attempt, the Lancer's twin-disc ceramic clutch transformed itself from exotic racing hardware into a cloud of pottery dust at the very moment it was supposed to be making the numbers that would make you understand.
From that moment on, all we could do was ask, "what if?"
And then it dawned on me.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild this run. We have the technology. Like Steve Austin's bionic implants, we could replace the damaged parts of the acceleration run and recreate a quarter mile that is better, stronger and faster than it really was... But, if I did it right, it could actually be fairly accurate.
Here's the deal: Our quarter-mile runs are measured with a radar gun. The gun measures the speed of the car 31.5 times a second and dumps that data into a laptop. The computer then looks at the speed every 0.032 seconds and determines how far the car traveled in that moment. After adding up hundreds of these data points, it knows how far the car traveled and how long it took to get there.
Looking at the plot of speed vs. time (page 24), you can see how botched the Lancer's one acceleration run was, and how incredible it is that it still ran a 12-second quarter mile. Looking at the red line on this chart, notice how the Lancer first rolls out gently, then lurches as the clutch grabs, bogs along for another half second or so, then starts accelerating with a fury we have never before witnessed. Just before the 1-2 shift, the Lancer is accelerating at more than 1g.
From here until the end of fourth gear, the acceleration run is a pure display of awe-inspiring power. Compare the Lancer's red line to the gray line left by the R33 Skyline. The king of all Japanese super cars looks like your mom's minivan by comparison. But right before the end of the quarter mile, as Akira Nakaari is shifting into fifth gear, something goes wrong again. A missed shift, perhaps? Whatever happened, it takes 0.67 seconds to complete the shift. Long enough for the Lancer's museum of wings, scoops and vents to slow the car by almost a full mile per hour.
What would have happened without all these mistakes? That's what I wanted to know. Digging up the acceleration data from all the all-wheel-drive cars we've tested in the last few months, I noticed that with the right technique, they all accelerated the same way for the first 1 to 1.5 seconds. That goes for all three of the Skylines and the 2002 WRX we tested for Eight Great Rides last month (unfortunately, the data from the stock Lancer EVO V we tested in May last year has long since hit the bit bucket). With the other all-wheel-drive cars launching exactly the same way, we can feel confident in replacing the Lancer's first bog and stumble with the acceleration data from a good Skyline launch.
So, looking at the black line now, the first 1.25 seconds is a clone of the R33's launch. That gets us from standstill to about 24 mph. I then grafted on the Lancer's acceleration data from 24 mph on, stopping only to replace the clumsy 4-5 shift with the acceleration profile of the 3-4 shift. Then I set my computer a-crunching.
With acceleration data laid out in 0.032-second increments, you can calculate the speed at each point like this:
| Speed (mph) =Accel. (g) x 21.92 ( mph/s ) x time (sec) |
| | g | |
The 21.92 part comes from the fact that 1g of acceleration is 21.92 mph/sec. This will give us enough data to see the new, bionic 0-30 mph time is 1.6 seconds (just like the Skyline that donated the launch) and the 0-60 mph time is an amazing 3.5 seconds. Now, it should be pointed out that in the original, real acceleration run, Nakaari shifted from second to third gear at exactly 59.48 mph, adding the shifting time to the 0-60 time. The Lancer did 0-59 mph in 4.6 seconds, but took 4.8 to reach 60. In the Bionic run, the shift didn't happen until 60.36 mph, which may or may not actually be possible, depending on when the rev limiter stops the fun. Worst case, though, 0-60 would take 3.7 seconds.
One more piece of math and we can get distance, since
| Dist. (ft) =Speed. (mph) x 1.467 ( ft/sec ) x time (sec) |
| | mph | |
and finally, we can see how long it takes to cover 1,320 feet. At first glance it looks like 11.6 seconds at 125.7 mph, but since our quarter-mile data is always calculated assuming a one-foot rollout like you would get with NHRA lights, and measures speed as an average over the last 60 feet of the track like the NHRA does, things change a little. The one foot of acceleration before the timer starts means the Lancer effectively gets a 4.88-mph rolling start. With that advantage, the quarter-mile passes in 11.4 seconds and the average speed over those last few feet is 124.9 mph.
OK, admittedly, slugging through my long-winded explanation of why the Lancer could probably do an 11.4 at 125 isn't nearly as exciting as reading that it actually performed such a feat of acceleration. If you need more excitement, go take in Pathak's festival of adjectives describing his time behind the wheel. See if that doesn't help.