For "short straights" (often enough, no real straights!) look to autocrossing. My PCA region had a tight course set up once, and one of the Shelby guys came over to play. His 350GT made all sorts of glorious racket, but my bone-stock (and fairly tired!) 914 with a third of the power (or less!) beat it by a significant margin.

He basically had to come to a stop in the corners, while I just took a quick dab at the brakes to make each corner. He could out-accelerate me in any gear at any time, but I didn't have to hardly slow down, so I came out of each corner significantly faster than him.

If your car suits a given track, and you know how to use it, you can pass cars that "should" be able to beat you.

--DD

Yea, I've done several AX events.
At the last one, the top 3 finishers were WRX, Z3, Corvette.

"He basically had to come to a stop in the corners" sounds like internet hyperbole to me.
Would you say the same thing about an M3 or a 911? Look up the curb weight.

Your 914 vs. GT350 tells us almost nothing since you're there is such an glaring and blatant difference in driver skill and experience. You drive an old 914, supposedly "know how to use it", work for a performance parts company, "suddenly" now have a wealth of experience with racing theory and practice, and extensively participate on a tracking/AX subforum discussing racing theory (13,000 posts) The GT350 guy probably watched some burnout video's on Youtube and bought the GT350.

sugarwood, give it a rest. Your premise is wrong and your examples are poor. Horsepower is not the end all be all. Handling is more important. That is a simple fact. Handling plus horsepower? Devastating!

The circular logic of stating I am wrong does not actually make me wrong.

In some cases, horsepower indeed trumps handling.
The almost dozen videos posted in this thread speak for themselves.

Autocross is an equalizer. Hp really does not help a lot. Handling is key. Grip is key. The fastest guy is not the one with the most hp, but rather the guy with the fastest average speed. And that is usually the guy that needs to slow down the least. Average speeds are not that high, so hp is not kry at all. It is about grip and braking less.

Locally, our autocross battles are between three cars... Late 2000's era mustang gt with lots of suspension mods, a new 200hp brz, and a super light, stock engine beater civic with proper suspension. All have great drivers. The brz won the last two years, but the three are always close. Three very fast cars, and three very different ways to get there.

Guess who won our nationals? Some guy from Central canada with a wrx with the fenders roughly cut out... And the most comical wide tires you have ever seen. It looked like a train wreck... And no one could touch him. He hardly needed his brakes.

You go right ahead and think what you want to think......my experience in autocross and racing bikes and cars probably trumps your experience so I would certainly trust my conclusions here over yours.

We didn't have any M3s on the course. The 911s were all 993s or older, as this was before the 996es (and later) really started running in my area. Very few if any 911s had to come to a stop in the corners.

I was really puzzled by the fact that my times were better than the Mustang, because it was obviously a faster car, and I think it may have even had R-compound tires? (I was on hard-compound street tires.) So I watched, and the 'Stang slowed to a much lower speed than I did to go around the corners. That was one of the "aha" moments, where I realized that carrying speed out of corners was so very important.

Yes, I was exaggerating. But not by as much as you seem to believe. I remember guesstimating that I was going at least 15 MPH faster at the apex than he was.

Well, at the time I had been autoXing for less than a year. I have no idea what level of experience the Mustang driver had, true. I suspect a really good driver could have still beaten my times, though. And Pelican isn't exactly a speed-parts development shop if you hadn't noticed, especially back at that point in time.

You are assuming that the Mustang driver had no skills and/or was an idiot. He sure didn't look like he had no skills to me. But I can't assume he was a professional race driver, and neither can you assume he was some idiot who didn't know how to drive.

I am not assuming I was an idiot; I know that for a fact. I've had to live with me for all my life, after all. ;)

Sure, my one experience doesn't tell us much if anything about the general case. But it does say that there are occasions when a whole lot of power is not going to automatically take the win. And a tight autocross course will often reward handling more than power.

I'm sure that if the straights had been of any noticeable length, the extra speed he could build on them would have been enough to overcome my advantage coming out of the corner. But on that course, on that day, it wasn't enough.

--DD

Maybe to put things into perspective.....my car was at 16.16:1 power to weight in the vids (from my records).

The cars I was trying to get by were at 9.5:1 and about 12:1.

Once a season our local autocross club held a special event that they called "kinky drags."

Unlike a normal slalom course there was two lanes so competitors could go head to head.

Each lane consisted of a long straight away in one direction, and then a straight line of slalom cones in the other.

Both competitors would drag race down the course, then slalom race back to complete the run.

The only braking zone was for the first cone.

This was really exciting because the high horsepower cars would always win the drag race to the first cone, but then things got interesting as the better handling cars caught up on the way through the cones. You could never predict which car would win. It was great giving such big advantage to the high horsepower cars and then watching the little cars real them in.

Many high horsepower cars won their heats, but the overall winner each season kinky drag was usually this one guy in a mini.
He has a picture on his shop wall of him going around the first cone on two wheels.

Too bad this thread has gotten snarky - there actually could be an interesting thesis to explore here. Rather than do a he said / she said pi$$ing match, couldn't one simply study lap times (average and record) of the various racing classes at select tracks? Using pro results would theoretically be the driver experience equalizer, and you could also factor in things like weather, etc.
Can't we all just get along??

I'm with Charles...

Read again what you said, and you're making that statement based on no evidence other than what Dave's writing shared. Driver skill is SO important when making these comparisons. I made that point a long time ago when we were focusing on the original 911 vs. Firebird video.

The way. See it driver X is getting passed by muscle cars in his SC, by driver Y

Driver X then gets a muscle car and proceeds to get passed by an SC by driver Z

Then driver X blames the tires :-)

My simplified hierarchy of importance at the race track:
1. Driver skill
2. Handling/cornering grip
3. hp

All three are essential, and you can't overly lack in any of the three to be competitive. 2 and 3 can swap places based on the track at hand. Fast cars have all three in spades.

ive read as little as ive contributed to this thread to this point admittedly. BUT!! if KTL has gotten a burr under his saddle enough to seem so cross I not a fan of yours shuge. pissin winders off is all good & fun, in fact encouraged. provoking kman to arms is blasphemy....


check yourself sugar.

t

The following video reminded me of this debate.

Anyone know what Benz model that is? Some AMG?
It is unpassable!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lv92NRD9uuo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Looks like either an SL63 or SL65 AMG. So likely 4300+ lb and not nearly enough tire but a LOT of motor.

Man, to be on Silverstone would be so cool.

Ok I've only read the first post and the last few, but the answer is it doesn't matter.

In real racing, there's classes and rules. These mostly equalize the cars so that the advantages in different parts of the track are small enough that you get good racing.

A track day is not real racing.

Here's video from a bunch of years ago of a 300 hp 914 passing most of a PCA Club Race field on the first lap. Many if not most of the cars being passed have more hp than the 914. A good driver like this makes the others look like they're on a warm-up lap. Green flies at 1:00.


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/D6K78YKA9UE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here's another one, same driver/car. Watch how he hunts down the white 911 and the GT3R, both of which clearly pull him on the straights.

With the GT3R, he ran out of time (checkered flag), but note how he tries to use traffic to his advantage to make a pass.


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