Lightning Lap 2016: The Year's Fastest Street Cars on America's Toughest Track

Every year for a decade now, we’ve fried tires—and occasionally our nerves—on America’s most demanding road course, Virginia International Raceway, to answer the ultimate performance-car question: What’ll it do? The track doesn’t care about marketing claims or badge snobbery; it treats every entrant equally harshly. This year we threw 18 cars (plus a few oddballs) into VIR’s paved crucible. Here, then, is what they did.

And just like that, a decade is gone. It’s been 10 years since our first Lightning Lap, 10 years since we endeavored to create a North American answer to the benchmark Nürburgring Nordschleife, where automakers take their fastest to joust for lap-time supremacy. It’s possible that Virginia International Raceway’s 4.1-mile Grand West Course will someday be displaced as the longest world-class road course in the U.S., being just a hair longer than Road America and just a smidge shorter than Belgium’s Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, but we’re here to stay. Ten years of data generated by 201 cars is the best kind of boat anchor, the long cable of comparative results keeping us tethered to this magnificent track for as long as people are interested in how fast the fastest new cars can go.

Our 2016 lineup has stark similarities to the one from November 2006. We had a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 then; we have the new Shelby GT350R now. We had a Chevy Corvette and a Z06 then; we have the freshly unwrapped Corvette Grand Sport this year. Back then, we had a BMW M6, a Dodge Charger SRT8 and Viper SRT10, and a Porsche Cayman S; this year we have the M2 and M4 GTS, a Charger SRT Hellcat and a new Viper ACR, and a Cayman GT4. The cars may be getting faster—the quickest one then, 3:00.7; this year, 2:44.2—but the brands that invest in performance have been remarkably consistent, because the people in charge of them know that 90 percent of establishing a bankable legacy is just showing up.

And show up they did, with 21 cars including a couple of track-only specials, which are not official LL1–LL5 class cars, and our own long-term 2015 Tesla Model S P85D because you, the readers, wanted to know how the big electric would do. Our usual assortment of classes ranges from LL1, for cars with sub-$35,000 base prices, up to LL5, for $245,000 and above. As a reminder, all the base prices you see on the following pages include performance-enhancing options, such as carbon-ceramic brake rotors, lightweight components, performance tires, and even high-bolstered thrones.

This year we tweak convention slightly by sequencing the cars here in finishing order, regardless of class. That’s simply to create a more logical progression through the story, from slowest to quickest. Otherwise, our three-day lap-a-thon in the warm but blessedly dry days of early June went by the procedural book, with only a few harmless spins and some grass-cutting excursions but nary a chipped splitter.

Armed with Racelogic VBOX GPS data loggers in each car to record the copious data, the quintet of editors who drove for time were left to their own instincts (and advice from attending engineers, in some cases) as to how best to extract the quickest laps. As usual, morning was the golden hour, when the cold track and cool, dense air could work their magic on grip and power. Even so, experience proves that every bit of the three days is needed to whittle down the lap times to data and impressions we can stand behind. So without further ado, here they are.

Lightning Lap 2016: Audi TTS