Road & Track's 2023 Performance Car of the Year.
A performance car isn’t a race car, but by definition it must perform. So what purpose does the track portion of the Performance Car of the Year competition serve?
The Subaru WRX should compete directly with the GR Corolla and Elantra N; its name is synonymous with budget performance. But this new WRX may be too mature—good for commuting, less good for track days. The brakes were prone to fade, and there’s an obvious focus on road comfort over high-velocity hilarity. The WRX was the slowest of this year’s competitors at 1:34.8.A tad quicker at 1:33.4 was the new Nissan Z. Sure, it has 400 hp, but it’s also more eager to slide than the Subaru.
This is one of the world’s finest manual gearboxes. Shifts are positive, direct, and slick. The turbocharged engine pulls to 7000 rpm like an excited goldendoodle dragging you to a squirrel. Its willingness to rotate off-throttle and scamper out of a corner on power is a thing of beauty. Front-wheel-drive-hating digital director Aaron Brown even says, “This is the car that could convert me.” Its lap, a 1:31.
Beyond sound and manic acceleration, the Cayman GT4 RS is balanced with a hyperconnected front end that won’t wash wide on power down. “Like a wedge of billet titanium,” senior editor Kyle Kinard says. “It feels as light as it does invincible.” It was the fourth most powerful in our test but ran a 1:22.7, the second-quickest time. However, nearly $200,000 is an astronomical price for a Cayman.There was never any doubt about which car would be the fastest this year.
That turbocharged three, connected to trick differentials and all-wheel drive, felt deeply special on track, but the package feels doubly fizzy on these roads where wet leaves and standing water abound.The Audi RS3 performs the same trick, reeling in cars with twice its $67,690 tested price. This relentless ball of muscle and five-cylinder snarl makes the whole effort of driving fast feel effortless.’s staff agrees: The RS3 would make for the best daily driver in the group.
We still haven’t wrapped our brains around the M4’s nose job, either. That flared pig’s snout that overtook the 4-series is spreading throughout BMW’s lineup. Yet the real curiosity is the badge affixed to this M4’s trunk. The letters “CSL” have graced only the lightest, most focused versions of the best compact BMWs ever built, legends like the E46 M3 CSL and E9 3.0 CSL “Batmobile.”
Somehow the most hard-core Cayman ever built, the GT4 RS, nosed just far enough toward sanity to avoid the Tecnica’s fate, with seats and suspension comfortable enough to keep us from reaching for the ’roid cream. Barely.The GT4’s captivating engine may have allowed us to take more punishment than we’d normally tolerate. That shrieking 4.0-liter 9000-rpm flat-six borrowed from the GT3 is a zenith, peerless in its charisma at redline.
Its dual-clutch automatic couldn’t shift quite as quickly as Porsche’s PDK, but it did click through gears smoothly and predictably. The Z07 package brought more spring to the party, but the Vette’s magnetic dampers are calibrated so superbly that you could easily live with the Z06 as a daily.
“One reason why we had such free rein on the LT6 with the double-overhead cams and the big intake manifold is that we didn’t have to worry about someone having to look over the hood,” says GM’s global small-block chief engineer, Jordan Lee. “This engine in a front-engine car? You’d barely be able to see through the windshield.”Lee contends this is a small-block V-8 because “a small-block is an engine designed and developed by the small-block team.” And it does share the 4.
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