Comparison Test Carveyance

All for One

Three American blades take Laguna Seca — the Dodge Viper GTS ACR, the Ford SVT Mustang Cobra R, and Chevrolet’s freshly sharpened 405-hp Corvette Z06. And across the water, a fourth waits for the gate to open.

Laguna Seca  ·  Monterey, California  ·  2002

“All for one, one for all — that is our motto, is it not?”Alexandre Dumas · The Three Musketeers

I have loved the Three Musketeers since boyhood, and I’ll confess the candy bar got there before the novel did — three little nougat soldiers under one wrapper, gone before the school bell. The book came later, and it kept me. Strip away the rapiers and the plumed hats and what remains is sturdier than swashbuckling: across some 700 pages, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis serve their king and they serve France, but the loyalty that actually moves them runs sideways, blade to blade. All for one, and one for all.

That, far more than horsepower, is why these three machines belong in a single sentence. The Mustang, the Corvette, and the Viper spend their whole lives trying to humble one another — and yet every time one of them bloodies the established European order, all three stand taller for it. Each haymaker Detroit throws at Stuttgart, Maranello, and Modena carries the same message to the rest of the planet: the American sports car will run with anything on earth, frequently beat it, and then hand you the invoice for half the money. None of these cars was conjured by a committee chasing prestige. They were built by the same calloused hands that poured the footings and raised the steel of this country — proud, contrary, and gloriously unimpressed by anyone’s coat of arms. So they fight, and fight hard, and then they nod across the fence and lend the neighbor a wrench, because in the end the victory belongs to all of them. They are Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to the letter. Permit me the introductions.

We brought them to Laguna Seca. There are faster circuits and prettier ones, but few that ask harder questions: 2.2 miles and 11 turns folded into the brown hills above Monterey, climbing blind toward a crest and then falling away through the Corkscrew — a quick left-right and a 5.5-story plunge that arrives in your stomach a half-second before it shows up in the data. Laguna cares very little for horsepower. It rewards the driver who can brake late, place a car to the inch, and trust a chassis over a hill he cannot see. It is, in other words, the perfect courtroom for three machines that each define the word “fast” so differently. The fog burned off, the asphalt warmed to about 70°F, and we sent all three around in anger.

One bit of housekeeping before the duel. Since we last convened this trio, Chevrolet has been back at the bench. The Z06 you’ll meet here is the 2002 car, freshly stamped with 405 hp — 20 more than before — which means our scorecard reflects the sharper blade, not the one Corvette has already begun quietly retiring. More on how those 20 horses were caught in a moment.

And here is the headline from the stopwatch, the one that surprises people: 1:40.6 for the Viper, 1:41.4 for the Corvette, 1:43.8 for the Mustang. Eight-tenths of a second covers the first two; barely 3 seconds covers all three. On a flat-out power circuit the Viper’s 75-hp advantage would carve a chasm. Laguna shrinks it to a crack, because here the clock is bought with braking markers and cornering nerve at least as much as with cubic inches. Which is precisely where the three personalities pull apart.

“The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.”Alexandre Dumas · The Three Musketeers

Athos is the oldest of the three and the one the others instinctively defer to. He is noble, formidable, and faintly tragic — a man of obvious gravity who has clearly done hard things and carries their weight without complaint. He never raises his voice, and he never has to. Nobody in the regiment takes Athos lightly, and nobody, ever, mistakes him for a toy.

Meet the Viper. Nine years and some 11,000 cars into its run, it is the senior nameplate in this company and wears the rank plainly. The GTS hands you 8.0 liters and 10 cylinders, 460 hp, and a tectonic 500 lb-ft of torque, served without apology or, in any meaningful sense, supervision. In American Club Racer trim it grows graver still: the $10,000 package adds five-point harnesses, freer-flowing filtration worth a claimed 10 hp and 10 lb-ft, monotube dampers and dramatically stiffer springs drawn from the GTS-R racer’s playbook (500 lb/in front and 1,100 rear, against 200 and 400 stock), and 18-inch forged BBS wheels that pare roughly 14 lb of unsprung weight while wrapping the road in enormous Michelins. The result is a street car with a competition license and the bearing to match.

Behind the wheel · the lap

Strap in and the Viper makes its case before the first corner. Down the front straight it is still pulling — visibly, violently — as the braking marker for the Andretti Hairpin arrives, the nose gone light at 145 mph while the V10 fills the cabin with that off-beat, ten-cylinder bellow. Then comes the part that separates the brave from the merely willing: hauling some 3,400 lb down from 145 to 49 mph for Turn 2. The huge front tires bite hard, but the weight pitches forward like a wave breaking, and the car demands that you commit to the brake and mean it. Get it right and it rotates and fires off the corner at 68 mph, harder than anything else here.

It is fastest wherever the road runs long and open — 145 mph on the front straight, 122 at the Rahal crest, the quickest car to every braking zone (103 mph into Turn 5 against the Corvette’s 101) — and fastest of all off the corner exits, where 500 lb-ft simply overwhelms the geometry. Through the quick stuff it grips like something bolted to the planet, helped by a pair of unusually progressive throttles that let even a careful driver meter the avalanche without spinning the 335-section rears into legend. The trouble is knowing where its distant corners are while it does all this; the flanks vanish from the seat exactly when you need them. And the Corkscrew belongs to the Viper for sheer theater: it crests at 137 mph and drops through the plunge with the largest vertical heave of the three — the most thrilling and the most demanding pass over that hill all day. The Viper is the fastest blade at Laguna if — and only if — the hand holding it never wavers. Its operating window is the smallest of the group, and it never lets you forget it. You don’t drive this car around Laguna so much as conduct it, all the while aware that it could end the partnership at any second.

It finished second to the Corvette anyway, for reasons Athos himself would understand. The Viper demands more of its driver than the others — more nerve, more road, more money. It stops from 70 mph in a long 186 ft, the worst of the group. And as tested, with a few comforts and a pair of painted stripes added back, ours crested $88,814 — very nearly the price of the other two combined. The Viper is magnificent and a little doomed, the last true believer in a creed the rest of the world is busy abandoning. Which is precisely what makes it impossible not to love.

He never raises his voice, and he never has to.

“Besides, we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.”Alexandre Dumas · The Three Musketeers

Porthos is the largest personality in the regiment: loud, vain about his finery, physically imposing, and forever a little underestimated by people who mistake the swagger for a lack of substance. He loves an entrance. He is also, beneath all the noise, genuinely powerful and genuinely loyal — even if subtlety was never among his gifts.

The Cobra R could not announce itself more thoroughly if it arrived by trumpet. There is the towering rear wing, the chin splitter scraping for emphasis, the deafening quartet of Borla side pipes — we logged 94 dB in the cabin at full cry, enough that your ears spend the following hour convinced the rest of the world has been turned down. Under the hood breathes a hand-built 5.4-liter four-cam V8, fortified with stout connecting rods, a racing oil pan, larger valves, and better breathing, and rated with what looks suspiciously like Midwestern modesty at 385 hp and 385 lb-ft. Inside there is no stereo, no air conditioning, and no back seat; Ford built exactly 300, and the buyers who landed one paid $55,675 for the privilege of doing without.

Behind the wheel · the lap

The Cobra R approaches Laguna the way Porthos approaches a tavern — loudly, and with total confidence that may or may not be earned. Its gift, it turns out, is braking. The big front Brembos and that wide, planted stance let it stop straight and honest into the Andretti Hairpin and the heavy Turn 5 stop, with a little nose-dive but no nasty surprises; of the three it is the most relaxed thing to slow down. It is happiest in the tight, technical corners and the slow stuff, where its communication and its forgiving nature let a driver lean on it without fear of being bitten.

But Laguna’s quick corners and long climbs are where the bill comes due. At 3,590 lb it is the heaviest car here by a wide margin, and you feel every one of those pounds load the outside tires through the fast Turn 4 and the critical uphill Turn 6, where it can carry only 82 mph in against the Corvette’s 89. The steering is slow and over-assisted, so the nose washes wide and asks to be wrestled rather than guided, and off the slow corners the independent rear — a clever module Ford grafted onto an old platform whose bloodline runs back to humbler Fords of the disco era — can still shimmy and hop when the torque lands. Over the Corkscrew its rear axle works visibly harder than the others’: busy, a little frantic, never quite out of control. It posts the slowest lap, 1:43.8, and earns every tenth of it honestly. The Cobra R is a homologation racer that wandered onto a road course and refuses to admit it’s outmatched — pure Porthos, all heart and bicep, swinging the hammer a half-beat behind the swordsmen. You love it for the stubbornness even as the clock disagrees.

“Opportunity is the martingale of man: the more we have ventured the more we gain, when we know how to wait.”Alexandre Dumas · The Three Musketeers

Aramis is the refined one, the cerebral one — more interested in the elegant execution than the grand gesture, content to let the others flex while he quietly wins the duel. He is no less deadly for being subtle. He simply prefers the scalpel to the hammer, and he is usually right.

Which brings us to the most consequential development of the year. For 2002, Chevrolet sent the LS6 V8 back to the laboratory and returned it 20 hp richer, to 405, with 15 additional lb-ft of torque, nearly all of it arriving above 3,500 rpm. About half the gain came from a more aggressive camshaft opening the valves further; to live with it, the engineers fitted stiffer springs and exotic hollow-stem valves filled with a sodium-potassium mix to shed heat — $8 pieces, five times the cost of the old ones, last seen on the twin-cam ZR-1. A smoother intake tract and the deletion of the two small pre-catalysts, no longer needed now that the underfloor units do the work, accounted for the rest. The chassis was sharpened in step: a thicker front anti-roll bar on aluminum links, a usefully tighter turning circle, and rear dampers re-valved to ride softer over washboard while resisting squat and roll. New spin-cast wheels replaced the old forged units and trimmed about 12 lb, dropping the Z06 to a feathery 3,118. A head-up display and CD player are now standard, the paint chart gains Electron Blue, and the front fenders wear badges that boast, accurately for once, “Z06 405 HP.”

Behind the wheel · the lap

Where the Viper bullies Laguna and the Mustang muscles it, the Corvette simply solves it. The mid-mounted transaxle gives the Z06 a balance the others can’t match, and you feel it the instant you touch the brakes: the car stays flat and faithful, the rear planted enough to trail the brake deep into the Andretti Hairpin without the tail threatening to come around. Turn-in is the sharpest of the three — point the nose and it rotates, alive and immediate, through steering that talks back. Small wonder the Corvette owns the corners that actually decide a Laguna lap: the fast Turn 4, the uphill Turn 6, the long downhill load of Rainey Curve, and the committed Turn 10, where it carries 98 mph to the Viper’s 96 and feels, in the words of one driver climbing out, as though it had quietly shrunk to fit him. Through the Corkscrew it is surgical — over the crest, down the plunge, landed and settled in one clean motion while the others are still gathering themselves.

It gives the straights back to the Viper, naturally — 117 mph at the Rahal crest to the V10’s 122, a top-end deficit it cannot argue with. And the same eager tail that makes it rotate so willingly will, with the electronics switched fully off or a corner overcooked, grow restless and keen to swap ends; it is the price of that lovely agility, and it returned the lowest cornering grip of the day for it. But the sum is a car that asks less of its driver and returns more lap time per unit of bravery than anything else here. It brakes from 70 mph in just 152 ft, the best of the group, and its reprogrammed electronics include a competition setting that permits exactly as much hooliganism as makes a car fast and not one degree more. The Viper is quicker by the watch; the Corvette is quicker by the heartbeat, because nearly anyone can drive it to the edge of its limit and live to brag about it. That, precisely, is how Aramis wins — never the strongest arm in the room, simply the one who never wastes a motion.

It is not flawless, and neither is Aramis. The seats are flat and short on lateral support, and Chevrolet still insists, maddeningly, on the fuel-saving “skip shift” that herds you from first straight to fourth. GM, for its part, claims the 405 will crack 60 mph in under 4 seconds and the quarter in 12.4 — figures we suspect we’ll struggle to repeat, having never coaxed a Z06 below 4.3 to 60 or 12.7 down the strip with our own stopwatches and our own right feet. No matter. It still wins this comparison by a single point, and it wins it on amenities, space, and price as surely as on the clock: it costs roughly $50,000, thousands less than the Cobra and barely half the Viper, and it is the only one of the three you could drive to the office on Monday without filing a grievance.

Tally the scorecard and the order reads Corvette, Viper, Mustang — first, second, third. But the scorecard misses the better truth, the one Dumas understood. The Z06 wins the duel, the Viper commands the deepest respect, and the Cobra R brings the most theater and the biggest heart, and not one of them diminishes the others by an inch. Every lap any of them turned around Laguna made the same argument on behalf of all three: that the American sports car, built by working hands for working money, fears nothing wearing a foreign crest. All for one.

“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”Alexandre Dumas · The Three Musketeers

A regiment of three is never the whole story, and any reader of Dumas knows it. The novel does not open on the Musketeers; it opens on a hot-headed boy from Gascony, riding into Paris on a sorry yellow horse with empty pockets, a borrowed sword, and an unshakable conviction that he belongs among the King’s finest long before anyone has invited him. d’Artagnan is not a Musketeer for most of the book. He is the provincial outsider, picking fights with his betters, surviving on nerve and wit and an instinct for the right move under pressure, earning — duel by duel, scrape by scrape — a place the establishment never meant to offer him. He considers himself worthy from page one. By the end, everyone else does too.

This is exactly why a fourth American car would have been the wrong answer, and why the fourth blade has to come from somewhere else entirely. Enter, from across the Pacific, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII.

Consider the mismatch. Where the Musketeers wield great naturally aspirated artillery — 10 cylinders, 8, a high-strung four-cam — the Evo brings a turbocharged 2.0-liter four, around 276 hp and 282 lb-ft, hung in a humble sedan that shares its silhouette with rental-counter Lancers. On paper it is outgunned and overmatched, carrying close to 12 lb per horsepower against the Corvette’s 7.7. On paper, d’Artagnan should lose every fight he picks.

He doesn’t, and neither does the Evo, because both win on qualities a spec sheet cannot hold. All four wheels drive, governed by the clever new Active Center Differential the VII introduced and an Active Yaw Control rear axle that shuffles torque side to side through a corner — which is, in literary terms, simply battlefield instinct. The Evo finds grip the moment the road turns greasy or broken or sideways, precisely when the big rear-drive brutes are busy lighting their tires and praying. It is light, fiercely balanced, rally-bred, and brutally effective in exactly the conditions that humble more glamorous machinery. It costs a fraction of what the others command. And it has, time and again, embarrassed cars wearing far prouder badges and far bigger numbers. That is d’Artagnan’s entire arc rendered in sheet metal: less status, less displacement, more results.

The ghost lap · what waits for 2003

Because we couldn’t help wondering, we ran the numbers on what the outsider would do to this place when he finally arrives — and Laguna would suit his strange genius perfectly. The Evo would not feel fast the way the Viper feels fast, nor light the way the Corvette feels light; it would feel, more than anything, inevitable. Under braking it would be the most stable car of the four — dead straight, no float, settling so quickly you’d brake later than instinct allows, 136 mph hauled down to a turn-in with no drama at all. Point it into a corner and the front would wash a fraction wide, that patient, rally-bred understeer; wait a beat, feed in the throttle, and the Active Yaw Control would begin shuffling torque across the rear and tug the car around from behind, firing it off the corner harder than 276 hp has any right to. Up the hill out of Turn 6 it would claw back every yard the straights cost it; through the Corkscrew it would stay eerily flat and already be accelerating during the drop, manufacturing grip where the others merely find it.

It would not be the quickest car here — reckon on 1:43 to the Viper’s 1:40.6 — and through the long, fast Rainey Curve you’d feel the all-wheel-drive drag and the nose pushing where the Corvette simply flows. But it would be the most repeatable thing on the circuit, lap after identical lap, the car that makes its corner exits so perfect you stop counting entry speeds altogether. Which is the most d’Artagnan thing imaginable: he never had to be the best swordsman in the room. He only had to win, and keep winning, until the room agreed he belonged.

He was never a Musketeer by birth. He simply decided he was one, and then made the rest of them agree.

There is a final, perfect symmetry. In this, the year of our test, you cannot actually buy a Lancer Evolution in America. It is sold in Japan and admired everywhere else — a legend whose reputation has crossed the ocean years ahead of the car itself, the outsider at the gate, not yet admitted to the brotherhood and already feared by it. But the gate is about to open. Word from Mitsubishi is that the Evolution will finally make the crossing for 2003, in the form of the Evo VIII, to take its place in the fight in the flesh. When it lands, the establishment gains a headache and the regiment gains a fourth sword. If Athos is the seasoned blade, Porthos the hammer, and Aramis the scalpel, then d’Artagnan in the Evolution is the blade still learning its own edge — and already, infuriatingly, cutting deeper than anyone expected.