2001 Honda S2000 - Sport Compact Car Magazine

Trophy truckers measure greatness by suspension travel. Muscle-car guys live a quarter-mile at a time. Show weenies are into... well, who cares what they're into?

Our car culture takes pride in owning the corners-on the street and track. Whether in a front-wheel-drive four-cylinder or an all-wheel-drive turbo six.

You see it in the data we collect and publish, though it is rarely the focus of the stories we do. Most often, it is a single line at the bottom of the spec box, or the small highlighted portion in some crazy graph we've generated. And it almost always takes a back seat to a lap time or horsepower figure. It's the measure of lateral acceleration, also known as cornering force, and is represented in a unit we have all understood since birth: gravity.

Though we have an inherent understanding of gs, how this force acts on a vehicle is more difficult to understand. Knowing that a car can pull 0.95g on a skidpad is like knowing a woman wears a size 34C bra. Each figure reveals one significant and specific characteristic, but doesn't say anything about the overall, uh, handling experience. In the case of the cars, what we found was that, with some heat in the tires and a lot of speed, some cars performed considerably better or worse than their skidpad numbers might suggest.

So when we came up with this idea of measuring the extremes of cornering force, we knew that simply recording skidpad gs was not enough. We'd have to wire up the cars with telemetry and hit the track as well.

The 1982 Williams FW08C was the real deal. The thing was just a work of art, and one of the world's fastest cars in its day.
The 1982 Williams FW08C was the real deal. The thing was just a work of art, and one of th

At least that was the original plan: invite a few street cars out to Willow Springs for a few laps on the 'pad and track. At first, we biased our selection towards handling rather than outright performance, wanting to include as many combinations of layouts and drivetrains as possible. Front-, mid-, rear-engine? Check. Front-wheel-, rear-wheel-, all-wheel-drive? Check. We looked for popular cars with popular modifications, but threw in some high-performance stock cars for reference.

Our only rules were that street cars showed up on street tires, race and time attack cars showed up on the R-compounds that their respective series mandated, and the rest was a free-for-all. We wanted real-world g numbers, so each car was aligned for the track and not the skidpad. For those that have the luxury of adjustable aerodynamics, we went for full downforce over lap times. As the list grew longer, our aims grew bolder. Why stop at street cars? If we're looking to pull the highest g-force, don't we have to include some serious race cars?

So calls went out to our pals who have friends who know guys with money and fast cars. Industry connections got us the hook-up with the 2006 championship-winning Star Mazda team, World Speed Motorsports of Sonoma, California. The kicker, however, was when tech editor Chen casually dropped: "What if we could get an F1 car?" That explains how Keke Rosberg's 1983 Monaco Grand Prix-winning car ended up on the same track as Philip Phong's 2000 Honda Civic.

It was a surreal scene that morning at the edge of the Mojave Desert. In all, we invited 13 machines, from a go-kart to an F1 car. The paddock had the oddest mix of machinery ever seen. In the middle were your typical track-day guys, Phong's Civic and a couple of Nissans. Behind each car was the standard pit pile, consisting of a spare tire, floor mats, CDs and a duffel bag with a torque wrench on top.