Sports Car 101

Sports Car 101
Enthusiasts have been arguing over what a sports car is since Jaguars were called Standard Swallows. Basically, a sports car is a car that has better road holding and performance than a standard two- or four-door passenger car (to say nothing of an SUV or pickup truck), thanks to a lower center of gravity, a more tightly tuned suspension and steering system, a performance-oriented transmission, finer aerodynamics, high-performance tires and a better power-to-weight ratio. This is why a sports car is plain fun to drive. A splendid Lexus or a limber Range Rover can be immensely satisfying, but a real sports car pastes a permanent smile on your face.

A sports car is also about style and impact. It's a car that, after you park it and walk away, compels you turn around for one more look. "Oh my god," you say to yourself, "that car is so cool." Tell me the last time you said that about your Explorer or E-Class.

Some sports cars are really street-legal race cars. The $440,000 Porsche Carrera GT is the most extreme example, closely followed by the Saleen S7 ($409,000) and the $143,345 Ford GT, which in fact is a close copy of a 1960s Le Mans winner, the Ford GT40. Even at the low end of the price spectrum, some sports cars have such strong race car characteristics — the Honda S2000 and Lotus Elise, in particular — that they'll happily go straight from the showroom to the track. Race-prepped MX-5s, Corvettes and Vipers are also popular as amateur-driven sports-racers.

Other sports cars are better spectators than racers. Cars such as the Jaguar XKs, Maserati Coupe and GranSport, Audi TT and Mercedes-Benz SLs certainly have athletic genes — a highly modified version of the Jag XK has won the Trans-Am pro-race championship four times — but they're more for stylin' than all-out performance, and happiest during comfortable cruises and weekend touring. The Jags and Mercs don't even offer manual transmissions, for example.

There is no such thing as a front-wheel-drive sports car, though there are a few that have all-wheel drive (Audi TT, Lamborghini Gallardo and Murcielago and several versions of the Porsche 911). Front-wheel drive is fine for low-powered passenger cars, in terms of efficient packaging and reasonably good traction, but making front tires steer, brake and transmit power to the road wouldn't work in a performance car. Also, placing the engine and drive wheels at the same end of the car would compromise its balance. True, the Porsche 911 has for over 40 years had its engine and drive wheels at the same end of the rear of the car, but the configuration has always presented problems for Porsche engineers. Today the 911 is one of the best-handling sports cars on the road, at least in part thanks to an excellent electronic stability-management system.

Purists have long insisted on manual transmissions as the mark of a true sports car, and some of us honestly prefer the more direct control a stick shift imparts — we can choose in advance the gear we want to use to most efficiently exit a corner — as well as the admittedly minor skill it takes to work one well. Sports car nerds like to throw around the expression "heel and toe," which in fact has nothing to do with heels or toes, but can only be done with a traditional manual transmission. The maneuver involves working all three pedals (gas, brake and clutch) simultaneously: slowing down by braking with the left side of your right shoe sole, while at the same time blipping the throttle with the right side of the sole and depressing the clutch to downshift with the left foot.

In fact, the only sports cars on sale in the U.S. that don't offer automatic, manumatic or clutchless sequential-shift transmission options are the Honda S2000, Lotus Elise, Morgan Aero 8, Dodge Viper, Ford GT and Porsche Carrera GT. (It's no coincidence that these are also the hardest-core sports cars in the land.) The pure, clutch-and-stick manual is slowly on its way to the land of starter cranks and wire wheels, supplanted by high-tech sequential-shift transmissions.