The 2016 Road & Track Performance Car of the Year

THE OLD BLACK FIREBIRD was blocking our exit from the gas station. As the passenger door opened, I saw the look on the face of the immense, camouflage-clad good ol’ boy who sprang out like he’d just spotted a new form of game on his personal hunting grounds. Throwing the Cadillac ATS-V coupe into neutral, I jumped out to greet the man before he reached our group. I spotted a sun-worn but freshly polished badge on the Pontiac’s front fender. No way. Could it be?

“Eighty-eight GTA, am I right?”

The driver, also wearing full hunting camo but half the size of his friend, laughed behind his wraparound sunglasses.

“Yeah! Been working on her for a while. Lot of specific parts to this model, you know? Everything from steering wheel to spoiler. Hard to get. What you boys doing down here? Some kind of test? That’s the new Ferrari, right?”

“488 GTB,” the hulking passenger clarified.

“Which makes this,” and I paused for effect, “GTA meets GTB.” In the space of the next few minutes, everybody shook hands and swapped stories and linked up on Instagram. Our new friends offered us some advice for finding a good meal and avoiding the local speed traps. They seemed to know almost as much as we did about our eight contenders, from the sleek Mercedes-AMG GT S to the flamboyant Shelby GT350R, although they readily admitted that our outrageous-looking Continental GT3-R was the first Bentley they’d ever seen in the metal. They also offered us some words of caution.

“Man, some of these roads are pretty tight, even for a car with this much power,” the driver suggested, pointing at the GTA’s hood and the 225-hp V-8 beneath it. “And these cars got … twice as much power?”

“In some cases, almost three times as much,” I replied, dropping into the deep Competition Sport bucket seat of the 650-hp Z06. The look I received in return contained both envy and pity. Sentiments I wouldn’t understand in their entirety until later, after I’d spent two full days hammering up and down these rural roads like a caffeine-powered cruise missile, my eyeballs shaking in their sockets and my hands sore from a hundred midcorner corrections, my internal accelerometer recalibrated to something between roller coaster and F-15 Strike Eagle.

“Y’all be careful, now,” the man with the Firebird said, as I fired up the supercharged Vette and started backing out of my parking spot. “Y’all be careful.”

THE CONTENDERS

WELCOME BACK, MY FRIENDS, to Performance Car of the Year, commonly abbreviated to PCOTY and pronounced to rhyme with “free-floaty.” This year, the first two days of testing will see our eight contenders cover 500 miles of lightly inhabited two-lanes, from Berea, Kentucky, through the Daniel Boone National Forest, and down to Cookeville, Tennessee. From there, we’ll take the longest way possible to NCM (National Corvette Museum) Motorsports Park, next to the famous Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

At the track, editor-in-chief Larry Webster will set lap times on a configuration that joins NCM West and East circuits into a loop of just under three miles. This favors cars with some irrational exuberance in the boiler room, which is good, because nearly every member of this year’s lineup can spin the needle off a chassis dyno.