From the December 2023 issue of Car and Driver.
Every so often, we get the notion to resurrect a story concept from long ago and produce a modern follow-up. For a variety of reasons, this often doesn’t work out—we figure out that Ferrari 250GTOs have gotten too expensive to huck around Laguna Seca, or John Phillips is banned from Tibet, and that puts the kibosh on that. But every now and then, we page through a favorite story in the vast Car and Driver archives, ask ourselves, “Could we do that again?” and come up with no good reason why not. Such was the case with our August 1998 story that pitted tuner cars in a race to 150 mph and back to a stop—an unforgiving and indubitably entertaining test of horsepower and braking acumen. We billed the test as defining “a new performance standard for the coming millennium” and then never did it again. Hey, stuff comes up.
In our defense, it is difficult to find real estate suitable for 150-mph exploits, and our 1998 venue—Chrysler’s Chelsea, Michigan, proving grounds, where we still test—wasn’t going to work for these particular hijinks. Back in the day, we used its 2.2-mile straightaway, but the only one we have access to now is 1.5 miles. That sounds like a lot until you’re doing 145 mph in a Honda Civic, staring at the speedometer creeping up digit by digit as you cover about two-thirds of a football field every second. To find a suitable stretch of asphalt, we had to secure our tray tables and taxi to Oscoda-Wurtsmith Airport, about three hours north of Detroit.
If you’ve never heard of Oscoda, that’s probably because you’re not a Cold War bomber pilot or part of a current DHL or Kalitta Air cargo crew. Oscoda was once a base for nuclear-armed B-52s to set off on round-the-clock trips to the Arctic Circle—just in case the Soviets got rowdy—but now it’s mainly a cargo depot and maintenance destination. Oscoda also has a freshly paved 2.2-mile taxiway.
Airport manager Jamie Downes advised that even though we’d be off the main runway, we shouldn’t wander too close to the Kalitta Air 747s running engine tests down beyond our starting line. “Did you see the MythBusters where they put cars behind a jet and throttled it up?” he asked. “They shot that here. The only vehicle that didn’t get blown away by the jet wash was a 57,000-pound plow.” We don’t have anything that weighs 57,000 pounds. Not even the Bentley Bentayga.
Yes, our 150-mph roster includes SUVs, which would have been unthinkable last time. So would including a stock Civic, although we brought one of those—the Type R, of course—along with its Korean antagonist, the Hyundai Elantra N, but not a Toyota GR Corolla, as it maxes out at 144 mph. Representing attainable German speed, Volkswagen sent a Golf R, and representing half-attainable and half-German speed, Toyota furnished a GR Supra 3.0. That car seemed a natural foil to the Ford Mustang Dark Horse, our lone thundering American pony car (we asked for a Dodge Demon 170, but no luck). Beyond the Mustang, prices got mighty fancy, with the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing dicing with the Bentley Continental GT Speed in a battle of large-format autobahn dominators. At the top of the food chain, Porsche fielded a 911 GT3 RS and a 911 Turbo S, and Chevy countered with a Corvette Z06.
To break up the internal-combustion hegemony, the Kia EV6 GT flew the flag for electric vehicles everywhere. It wasn’t supposed to be the only EV, but the Tesla Model S Plaid we’d rented caught a nail in a tire the day we were heading to Oscoda, and we couldn’t get a replacement in time for testing. We did, however, run it later at our usual test venue since the straightaway there is long enough for a car that hits the required speed in a quarter-mile, and we ran a Lucid Air Sapphire on the straightaway at Virginia International Raceway. The results don’t count for the official scoreboard, but they were certainly enlightening [see “Heroic Electrics,” below].
A note about our results: They’re more like lap times than our typical performance figures. We didn’t subtract the initial one-foot rollout or apply any correction for ambient conditions, and the results are simply the best run, not an average of passes in both directions or a merging of acceleration and braking segments from different runs. All of the foregoing, and the fact that Ocsoda’s fresh asphalt isn’t nearly as grippy as the concrete from our usual test venue, means that the 60-mph and quarter-mile times from this test aren’t comparable to other test results.
As for our methodology, you might wonder how we attained precisely 150 mph before hitting the brakes. Answer: That was part of the challenge. Drivers had to eyeball the VBox display on the dash and attempt to max out at precisely 150 mph, which was easier in some cars than in others. At 145 mph, the 911 Turbo S was still scrolling numbers like Satan’s slot machine, while the less powerful cars aided precision.
In all but the slowest couple of vehicles, drivers would ideally initiate braking (as recorded by a trigger affixed to the pedal) at a hair under 150 mph. Then there is a fraction of a second as the pedal strokes down, hydraulic fluid pulses through the lines, calipers squeeze, and rotors begin transforming kinetic energy to heat. And that sliver of latency is the window for the car to clear the buck-fifty hurdle before initiating its brutal trip back to a stop. Judging that lag was its own black art, but if a driver actually saw 150 mph on the VBox display before braking—with the left foot in cars with an automatic transmission to save time—then that was probably too late. Some of the faster cars gained a half-mile per hour or more before the brakes took over. And, of course, if the Vmax speed was under 150 mph, the run did not count.
Indeed, for a seemingly simple exercise, a lot can go awry. You can duff the launch, brake too early, or brake too late. Maybe the car gives a wiggle while hauling down and strays onto the dust at the edge of the lane. Perhaps you forget to turn off the air conditioning or fail to set the car in its most advantageous launch or aero mode. The preflight checklist differs from an Elantra N to a Z06 to a 911 Turbo S.
But they all have one thing in common, both with one another and with those tuner cars from a quarter-century ago: Visiting 150 mph is always a thrill, even if you only stay there for a moment.
The Contenders
0–150–0 mph: 52.7 seconds
Flat-earthers might change their beliefs after watching the Civic Type R complete its trip to 150 mph, which requires so much pavement—8389 feet of it—that the white Honda seemed to disappear over the horizon. In the time it took for the GT3 RS to make two runs, the Civic was busy completing a single pass down in the here-be-dragons territory of the Oscoda airport map.
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0–150–0 mph: 47.0 seconds
As our own Csaba Csere pointed out in 1998, overcoming aerodynamic drag at 150 mph requires 3.38 times as much power as it does at 100 mph. That’s why Bonneville land-speed cars all look more like the sleek Elantra than the big-winged Civic, and it’s surely one reason why the Elantra N pulled ahead of the Civic by more than five seconds at 150 mph despite its 39-hp deficit.
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0–150–0 mph: 40.2 seconds
After the tricky, tire-frying clutch drops of the Civic and the Elantra, launching the automatic, all-wheel-drive Golf R was as routine as clocking in for your shift at the 150-mph factory. One driver noted, “Put it in Special mode that’s labeled Nürburgring, push on the gas, push on the brake, rev it up, and it goes.”
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0–150–0 mph: 32.8 seconds
Reaching 150 mph in the Bentayga was no big deal. There’s no launch control, so you just brake-torque its conventional eight-speed automatic and go, bracing for a violent one-two upshift. The 542-hp twin-turbocharged V-8 is healthy enough to dispel most W-12 FOMO, muscling the bodacious SUV to 150 mph in 25.7 seconds.
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0–150–0 mph: 31.2 seconds
On a recon run, without the complete array of test equipment active, the EV6 notched a 30.8-second pass, which would have put it ahead of the Supra. Alas, without the granular data, the score from the Russian judge got tossed, and the EV6 officially finished 0.1 second behind the Supra.
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0–150–0 mph: 31.1 seconds
Although this test doesn’t involve much lingering at triple-digit speeds, some cars spend enough time there to reveal foibles. And in the Supra’s case, the low-speed agility that makes it such fun on a twisty road manifests as unsettling jitters at high speeds.
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0–150–0 mph: 29.7 seconds
We’ve driven a lot of 5.0-liter Mustangs, so launching the Dark Horse was a familiar exercise: Be patient with the throttle, get it rolling, then go wide open. Get it hooked up, and 60 mph arrives in 4.3 seconds, which is normal Mustang stuff, really. It’s pretty much all as expected until you hit the brakes and your eyeballs get sucked out of your head.
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0–150–0 mph: 24.8 seconds
The GT Speed messes with your mind because you expect it to be quick—it’s got “Speed” right there on the badge—but it’s hard to fathom how 5045 pounds can launch like this. The Speed uses an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission that enables real-deal launch control, with a 5000-rpm clutch drop lobbing the twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter W-12’s 650 horsepower and 664 pound-feet down to the pavement like a grenade over a wall.
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0–150–0 mph: 24.7 seconds
With 6.2 liters of supercharged V-8 crammed into the Caddy’s engine bay, power-robbing heat soak was the primary obstacle to a quick run. Well, that and traction—Oscoda’s fresh pavement posed a challenge for our more muscular rear-drivers.
We kept dialing down launch control—all the way down to 1300 rpm—and there was still a whole lot of torque modulation going on all the way through first gear. But the Caddy’s 668 horsepower asserted itself at high speed with the fourth-quickest 150-mph time, and its trackworthy brakes shrugged off that speed in 664 feet and felt like they’d be happy to keep doing so all day long.
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0–150–0 mph: 24.4 seconds
The GT3 RS wasn’t the quickest car of the test, but it sure sounded like it. When the GT3 RS headed for the starting line—pausing for a launch-control start or two to warm up the tires—airport workers lined up at the fence to watch. It was always a worthy spectacle, the GT3 chattering at 6500 rpm before shrieking off the line and kissing 9000 rpm while sounding like the devil’s dirt bike.
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0–150–0 mph: 22.5 seconds
The Z06 is a road-course car, not a drag racer. But its performance here proved that it’s game to trip the beam at your nearest staging lights, cracking off an 11.3-second quarter-mile. The Z06’s launch control is manually adjustable, but we got the best times in auto mode, letting the car learn the surface and adjust its aggression accordingly.
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0–150–0 mph: 19.3 seconds
The world’s premier business-class rocket ship required less than a half-mile to hit 150 mph and return to a stop. Setup was easy: Select Sport mode, which keeps the active front and rear spoilers in their low-drag position, then hit the Sport Response button to increase the launch-control threshold from 4000 to 5000 rpm. After that, hang on for a four-wheel burnout, followed soon thereafter by the quarter-mile mark (10.5 seconds) and 150 mph (13.5 seconds).
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Heroic Electrics
The 0-to-150-to-0 leaderboard of the future seems destined to be battery powered.
When our rented Tesla Model S Plaid showed up with a nail in its tire, we attempted to overnight a replacement tire. But Tesla-spec rubber is hard to come by, and the 1020-hp Model S couldn’t make it to Oscoda in time. Instead, we ran it the next week at our regular test venue. Because of the different track surfaces, we’re not including the Tesla in our official results. A further disappointment is that we couldn’t get a Plaid with the $20,000 Track package that offers upgraded wheels, tires, and carbon-ceramic brake rotors; our test car was on the base 19-inch Pirelli P Zero PZ4s.
Since we were already adding asterisks, when we found ourselves at Virginia International Raceway with a 1234-hp Lucid Air Sapphire, we figured we might as well make a few 0-to-150-to-0 passes. Obviously, VIR introduces yet another incomparable surface, and its straightaways are far from test-track flat.
Nevertheless, both megapowerful EVs ran more than three seconds quicker than the Porsche 911 Turbo S. As expected, the EVs’ advantage is in acceleration. The Plaid gets to 150 mph in 9.7 seconds and the Sapphire a second quicker still, putting them 3.8 and 4.7 seconds, respectively, ahead of the Porsche. That edge more than offsets their stopping distances, which were, thanks to their hefty curb weights, roughly 100 feet longer, hurting their overall times by less than a second. Very unofficially, the Sapphire’s time of 15.5 seconds beat the Plaid’s 16.2-second time. —Dave VanderWerp
Moving the Goal Post
Before gasoline lost its lead, the 0-to-100-to-0 test was the benchmark of measuring a vehicle’s ability to accelerate and decelerate in one swift pass. In 1960, Aston Martin claimed the DB4GT did the deed in 24 seconds. Today it would likely be trampled by the average three-row SUV.
In 1965, Carroll Shelby boasted that his 485-hp Cobra 427 could do it in 14.5 seconds. Engineer, Shelby test driver, and racer Ken Miles was said to have done it in 13.8. For its time, the accomplishment seemed unfathomable; however, analyzing our test numbers gives it some legs.
When we tested the 2529-pound Cobra 427, it got to 60 mph in 4.3 seconds and arrived at 100 in 8.8. It covered the quarter-mile in 12.2 seconds at 118 mph—that’s quicker than a Mustang Dark Horse. But without anti-lock brakes, stopping the Cobra 427 would require a master’s in threshold braking.
To compare the ’60s metal with modern machines, we ran the Porsche 911 Turbo S through the 0-to-100-to-0 wringer. It needed just 9.7 seconds to complete the task.
The Cobra paved the way for a more strenuous test, which is why we added 50 mph in the 1990s. At 150 mph, overcoming aerodynamic drag requires 3.38 times as much horsepower as it does at 100, and the brakes must dissipate 2.25 times the energy. With today’s active aero, huge brakes, and massive horsepower numbers—and the fact that a Honda Civic can reach 150 mph—perhaps it’s time to add another 50 mph. —David Beard
Senior Editor
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He’s now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.
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