Andrew Frankel: The car that has exactly ‘enough’ performance

I have long maintained that 5.2sec is the perfect 0-60mph time. Brief enough to be exciting, long enough to be savoured, for there is unquestionably a trade-off between the intensity and brevity of the experience. But recently I have come to wonder whether that number should be revisited.

Out there in the real world, no one does 0-60mph times. Back in my days as an Autocar road tester I seemed to spend half my life doing them and I only ever enjoyed it when everything hooked up just right; and in those days of manual transmissions and primitive turbos, with no launch or traction control, that wasn’t every time. Over a period of a considerable number of years, no small number of cars cracked under the pressure in my hands.

So is that 5.2sec time a number capable of being extracted by a seasoned road tester using brutal techniques, or is it more a measure of what a car might achieve in that sort of time if you just put your foot down and don’t think too hard about it?

Also, what kind of car are we talking about? A 0-60mph time is only partly a measure of power and torque; so too is it a measure of traction and, in certain cars, predominantly so. A McLaren F1 will spin its wheels from 0-60mph without thinking about it, so extracting the best time is actually an exercise in saintly restraint, meaning the resulting time (3.2sec) is a terrible indicator of true performance. By contrast certain cars are flattered because they have all-wheel drive, so traction is not an issue. A front-wheel-drive car capable of hitting 60mph in 5.2sec is, in the real world, a dramatically quicker car than one with four driven wheels that will do the same time.

So what do I mean when I talk of a car having the right amount of performance being capable of accelerating from rest to 60mph in 5.2sec? I guess I mean a car with decent but not insuperable traction being driven by me in road tester mode but without the aid of launch control, traction control, sticky tyres or instant shifting.

But I wonder if today that is quite quick enough? When I was a kid, those were the sorts of times you needed a Lamborghini Countach to achieve, but now a basic Porsche Boxster needs no less to do the same and it’s not quite enough.

‘Enough’ is a level of performance where you can take a car out on the deserted road of your dreams, reach the other end and realise you never once wished for stronger acceleration. And I was on such a road in such a car just a few days ago: it was a Porsche 911 Carrera T with a manual gearbox and the slowest 0-60mph time of any new 911 – 4.5sec. So that’s my new benchmark.

“The WEC story was one of almost total domination by Toyota”

The 2023 World Endurance Championship is over, and its story was one of almost total domination by a single team. Toyota took six wins out of seven races, its drivers first and second places in the title chase. Job done then? Well, yes and no. The truth is that out there in the big wide world, hardly anyone knows and even fewer care who won races one, two and three or, indeed, races five, six and seven. But everyone with even a passing interest in sports car racing knows who won race four. For that was Le Mans, won not by Toyota but by Ferrari on the centenary of the 24 Hours race, the half centenary of Ferrari’s last participation there, and only after the people who said they would not change the balance of performance until after Le Mans changed them immediately before – in Ferrari’s favour.

Who knows what would have happened had this last-minute meddling not taken place? But the strange thing is a tiny bit of me actually feels just a little sorry for Ferrari. Because what it did in producing the second-most competitive prototype race car out there, in its debut season, after years out and bested only by the greatest team of recent times was genuinely extraordinary. And any perception that it was in any way externally assisted in its bid to win Le Mans devalues that achievement, ever so slightly. Or perhaps I’m taking myself far too seriously. In years to come people will remember only who won Le Mans in 2023, not the means by which it was achieved.

Talking of Ferrari, I’ve just spent a working week in one, using a 296 GTB as my daily driver. It had been specified in the colours of Colonel Ronnie Hoare’s old Maranello Concessionaires race team, so a red body with a baby blue nose and wheels. While this is not a combination I’d choose for my street Ferrari, this car has a rather different job – to stand out on the pages of the magazines and websites on which it is featured. And that it does outstandingly well.

But every time I mentioned it on social media, almost every comment was about the colour choice, and not one concerning what this extraordinarily rapid car might be like to drive. “Ask me about how well integrated is its 831bhp hybrid drive powertrain,” I urged in my head, or whether the Assetto Fiorano lightweight pack was worth the extra outlay. Fat chance. After a few dozen comments along the lines of “Did you feel the need to drive it with a brown paper bag over your head?”, I gave up. Pity.

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A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery
Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel