Most drivers get their first and initial taste of motor vehicle performance from a Street-Road car. This often becomes the point of reference for many. If an interest for motorsports and exploration of motor vehicle performance developed, more often than not, the target vehicle is a road-street vehicle. Couple this with brand image, brand identity marketing (racing and related competition) with the mis-guided simple minded belief of more power will always result in the faster vehicle.
Acceleration is the easiest aspect of vehicle performance to access, chassis dynamics is a LOT more complex and difficult to ascertain what is excellence in that area of vehicle performance.
There is also a widely held belief that ownership of a exotic performance vehicle results will achieve instant extreme performance ability. This is one of the root causes of so many performance vehicles being destroyed and wrecked on public roads. Individual ego and more are often tied to these occurrences too.
Then we have real race cars like this Lola T90-91 Sports 2000, powered by what is basically a FORD Pinto motor with about 130 Bhp normally aspirated in a near 1000 pound chassis capable of no less than 1.5 to 2.0Gs of cornering grip, aero does have an effect on this chassis. Note the encounter with the white BMW near the end of this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2nrxJzi_-Y
The 24 Hours of LeMons version, Mazda 12A PP rotary powered exxe chassis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-CJPtTCQgg
As much as I'm an exxe fan, it is real race cars like this where my passion and interest for performance vehicles are. The exxe being one of the closest and similar chassis dynamics of real race cars can be due to it's small size and mid-engine chassis-suspension dynamics. Add more power and set up the chassis-suspension properly and the results often exceeds what most could imagine or know. Much of this capability and reality is kept hidden by Fix It Again Toni brand identity, under powered as delivered and the mis-guide belief that Italian cars specially "FIAT" are poorly built, cheap, fragile and un-reliable.
Add to this some track day experience and proper driving instruction goes a long way to the motor sports experience.
Pete's Honda powered exxe is just one example of what IS possible.
Bernice
Gee whiz, all I did for father's day is drive a bit over an hour each way to get some Fiat parts in the morning and later in the afternoon get an unplanned visit by two of my local Fiat buddies and proceeded to spend several hours just talking cars. Was a wonderful day.
After I started doing track days I was less prone to doing, ahem, street chasing since the track days taught me how fast you can really go in any car and all my track days were done in Fiats or the Miata I had. As noted, most folks who own high end performance cars have no training have have no clue how to properly drive them near the limit. I met a guy last week with a Honda S2000 in his old BMW 2002 and after talking track days with him it was clear he probably pisses off a lot of folks at track days.
