All Wheel Drive Test - Grip Madness

All Wheel Drive Test Cars Top Front View

Two cars in this test accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 5.9 seconds. Ordinarily, such a performance would be unimpressive. Embarrassing even. Only there's nothing ordinary about this test. That 5.9 seconds dropped our jaws and blew off our socks. You see, that 5.9 seconds is in the wet. That's right, the wet. We bought 600 feet of garden hose to soak down the launch pad. We also watered down half of the streets of Willow Springs road course and flogged the four-wheelers like Tonka toys in a sandbox before flinging them around the skidpad. All with our ever-present timing gear keeping them honest, of course.

Hey, if two Lancer EVO VIIs, two Subaru WRXs, a Skyline GT-R and a highly overpowered Audi TT showed up at your house, ready to be put through the wringer, what would you do? You'd spend two days pounding their clutches into piles of stinky smoldering Kevlar in search of data, which is exactly what we did.

What were we trying to prove? Not much. The world already knows all-wheel drive is universally superior when it comes to limited-grip situations, and can get a car off the line quicker if given enough power. Still, we figured we could learn which all-wheel-drive systems are truly impressive and which systems are for poseurs. Or which can take the pounding and which can't. Or which respond best to mods when tested in a real-world scenario. Take your pick, mostly we just wanted to see what would happen.

What did happen was a little unexpected. At the end of day one, after spanking the other five cars around the road course and around the skidpad, the wide-bodied Cobb Tuning WRX had a rather painful territorial dispute with a water truck, and as you might imagine, it got the raw end of that deal. But even a hard lesson in Newtonian physics, which amounted to $22,567 worth of damage to perhaps the finest WRX in the country and a $2,000 ding to the water truck, wasn't enough to stop us. We broke camp, migrated to the dragstrip at California Speedway and put the other five cars through thorough acceleration, braking and slalom testing.

Day One
Road Course
Modern all-wheel drive is supposed to be flexible. Most systems have the ability to be invisible when they're not needed, but provide save-your-ass grip when they are. We designed the road course test with obstacles to test both of these objectives. The configuration we chose for The Streets road course used both fast sweeping turns, 100-mph straights and ultra-slow, autocross-style corners. We sent out the water truck to soak the low-speed portion of the track before each car had its shot at lap times. Then we recorded total lap times and split them over the wet and dry sections of the track.

Cobb Tuning's WRX was at home on our makeshift torture road. With 2.5 turbocharged liters, the grip of a Velcro-enhanced tree frog and a very autocross-friendly handling balance, it combined all the right strengths to be the fastest of the bunch. The WRX's 1.73-second total margin over the Ziel Motorsport EVO came exclusively from the dry section of the track. In the wet section of track, where the EVO turned the fastest split time of the group, the WRX was .65 seconds off its pace. This difference speaks worlds for the effectiveness of the EVO's smart differentials in the less-than-perfect arena of wet performance driving. The WRX was hampered further by painful understeer in the wet sections where its wide Kumhos turned from ultra-grippy gumballs to hydroplaning boats. In the dry section, however, the Kumhos paid dividends with huge mechanical grip, and the WRX trounced the EVO by 2.38 seconds.

The Motorex Skyline was only 0.08 seconds off the EVO's total lap time, although its speed was more a result of sheer power than handling prowess. The Skyline's monster engine allowed it to outpace the EVO by 0.89 seconds through the dry sections, but its 3,400 or so pound curb weight and long wheelbase forced it to give up that and more in the wet (0.97 seconds).