2012 Motor Trend Best Driver's Car

As race car driver Randy Pobst said when he saw the crop of contenders we assembled for this year's Best Driver's Car, "This is really the stuff of car guy dreams." Darn tootin'. Only two of the nine cars make fewer than 500 hp. Seven of them placed in the top 20 of our Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca lap times, and six of them were in the top 15. The slowest car from 0 to 60 mph took 6.4 seconds. The next slowest took 4.2 seconds. Even more amazing, the rest ran under 4 seconds, with three of them doing the deed in fewer than 3 seconds. And how can you not love a group of cars with the names Lamborghini, Porsche, McLaren, AMG, Shelby, and Jaguar? You simply must! These are all supercars. Well, eight of 'em are supercars, and one is the Subaru BRZ. But don't count the little Japanese featherweight out just because it doesn't have the pedigree, performance, and price tag of the others.

After all, this is Best Driver's Car. It's not about numbers and straight-line performance. If it were, to paraphrase editor-at-large Angus MacKenzie, we'd just rent a top fuel dragster and call it a day.

Instead, we spent more than a week with all nine contenders to determine which one is the best to drive. We put each car through our standard battery of dynamic tests before letting our resident evil scientist Kim Reynolds rig up all the cars with a full complement of sensors for even more measurements. From there, we took our fast nine to one of our favorite California canyon roads and, with a little help from our pals at the California Highway Patrol, blasted them up and down a gorgeous 5-mile stretch of tarmac. One of the officers even whipped out his radar gun and -- while smiling -- clocked the Aventador hitting 130 mph. It's good to be friends with The Man.

Finally, we handed all the cars over to the aforementioned Pobst to see what he could wring out of them around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Oh, and for purely journalistic reasons, I was forced to jump into each one and have my own go around that gorgeous, iconic, 2.3-mile track. We also spent a few hundred miles running around on freeways. While that last part is a small piece of the overall puzzle, if a car rides so harshly that you don't feel like driving it to, let alone on, your favorite road, what's the point?

Once we finished with all that data collection, we sat down and picked a winner. Let me explain the process. This year, we assigned a panel of seven judges: MacKenzie, executive editor Ron Kiino, technical director Frank Markus, road test editor Scott Mortara, video all-star and associate road test editor Carlos Lago, associate editor Scott Evans, and me. We also elected to give Randy a vote this time, because, as the years roll by, he is becoming more and more a part of our team. That, of course, means eight votes, which would be tricky in the case of a split decision. But that wasn't an issue. In summary, picking the Best Driver's Car, while fun, takes a great deal of time, thought, sweat, and vicious arguing. And we'd like to think that had you been there with us, you would've arrived at the same conclusion.

You might be asking yourself, "Where's the Pagani Huayra?" Let me try and explain the rules for BDC. First of all, the car has to be on sale (or at least, about to be on sale) in the United States of America. This is why we don't have Paganis, Koenigseggs, or that bright-red Ferrari on our cover, the F12 Berlinetta. Here's to next year. OK, fine, but "why no Corvette ZR1?" Well, because three years ago, when the ZR1 competed in our 2009 Best Driver's Car, it finished in 6th place behind the 2010 Shelby GT500. As Ron Kiino put it then (with a hat tip to Tom McCahill), "The ZR1 is about as hairy as a gorilla bathing in Rogaine." Since it didn't win then and hasn't been substantially changed since, we didn't invite the Blue Devil back. You will notice that last year's second-place car, the Nissan GT-R, is back. That's because Nissan has implemented a schedule of continuous Godzilla improvement, and this year's version makes more power and has a tweaked transmission and a revised suspension. We invited last year's winning Ferrari 458 Italia to come and defend its crown, but Ferrari declined. It also declined to give us the 458 Spyder, the reworked California, and the FF. Got it? Good.

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