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"           Meet Bryan Herta                     How They Ranked          1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8             Our Search for the Best-Handling Car for Road and Track        .   Meet guest test driver , eight-season CART veteran.   Check out the of our handling tests and for the cars.   Download our PDF to find out how the individual editors rate each car in the test.   Go for an exclusive collection of photos and commentary from this gripping event.       By the standards of California&amp;#039;s vast Central Valley, Bryan Herta lives near our Buttonwillow test track. But that&amp;#039;s not why we asked this 31-year-old Valencia resident to help us test the best-handling cars in America. We chose Bryan because this thoughtful and articulate professional driver is able to repeatedly squeeze every last bit of performance out of any car he&amp;#039;s driving. What&amp;#039;s more, Bryan likes production cars, a point proven early in the day when he burbled into the paddock driving his red 1995 Dodge Viper.   &amp;quot;I want to tell you guys,&amp;quot; warned Bryan immediately, &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t had much experience driving production cars on racetracks.&amp;quot;   It sure didn&amp;#039;t look that way. After only a few exploratory laps around the East Loop, Herta was quickly up to speed, pushing each car to its limits and offering insightful commentary every time he pulled into the pits.   This information download was much like a de-briefing with an engineer, something Herta has done often in his career. He starred in karts in the 1980s, capping the decade by dominating the 1989 Skip Barber Formula Ford series. Then, following championships in the 1991 Barber-Saab Pro series and Indy Lights in 1993, Bryan began the first of his eight seasons in CART, when he suffered a season-ending crash at Toronto that badly damaged his pelvis. He bounced back, though, and found his best CART success driving for Team Rahal, scoring back-to-back wins at Laguna Seca in 1998 and 1999, beating, among others, Juan Pablo Montoya. And most recently, as a factory Panoz driver, Herta \u2014 who&amp;#039;s president of the North American Karting Association \u2014 was only 40 minutes away from a podium finish at Sebring when the master cylinder failed, causing the big roadster to lose its brakes.   In all, an impressive resum\u00E9, to which Bryan can now add: &amp;quot;guest test driver, Road &amp;amp;amp; Track magazine.&amp;quot; \u2014 Andrew Bornhop   Handling: The Dynamicist&amp;#039;s View   Handling is really the sum of the driver and the vehicle. The driver provides the input and the vehicle responds with feedback. Without an easy way to characterize the driver, we are left to study the vehicle response, or the vehicle dynamics.   To make sense of handling, it is also necessary to define the task. For example, highway driving and racing are very different activities, with different requirements for both the driver and the car. The general question, &amp;quot;How do you like the handling?&amp;quot; can be answered in many different ways. Specific questions applicable to the road and track are needed: &amp;quot;How do you like the high-speed tracking?&amp;quot; Or, &amp;quot;What do you think about the balance under braking? Is it stable when you turn in?&amp;quot;   While all of the car&amp;#039;s controls are important (throttle, brakes, gearbox, etc.), the steering is key to good handling. In the 1950s, aerospace-engineers-turned-weekend-sports-car-racers from Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, came up with a list of handling criteria originally titled &amp;quot;Desirable Vehicle Characteristics.&amp;quot; The following is an annotated version of the list:   Steering response to be fast and well damped, with the car showing minimum roll angle and roll/yaw coupling. The car should follow the steering with minimum fuss. This applies to any car at any speed. But it is most important for racing \u2014 the interaction between body motions and the steering (i.e., roll steer). Some design factors to consider are low weight and rotational inertia, stiff springs, hard shock-absorber settings and wider, stiffer tires.   Steering ratio appropriate for the speed range and adequate for emergency maneuvers. Race cars require a sensitive touch on the wheel; the steering is fast for catching skids without shifting hands. For the road, the opposite extreme is the &amp;quot;sneeze factor&amp;quot; attributed to Harry Grylls of Rolls-Royce, with suitably slow steering so that the driver can sneeze and not change lanes.   Smooth steering control force with progression in normal driving, definite on-center feel and moderately fast return. Here is one area where the road car is often heavily compromised. A light car with good non-assisted steering will usually give the best road feel.   Minimum steering backlash, springiness and shake. Modern steering systems have eliminated backlash. Minimum steering-wheel vibration is desirable in street cars, leading to the use of rubber isolators, but some imprecision results.   Minimum change in car direction, pitching and control response with road roughness. Street cars deal with much rougher roads than road-racing cars.   Modest aerodynamic and tire/road steady-state stability over speed range. By definition, a stable car will return toward the original path after some disturbance, say, a bump in the road. In the equations of motion, stability has two parts: (1) Understeer and oversteer. They remain roughly constant at any speed. And to make best use of all four tires, balance is important, especially for racing. (2) Yaw damping. It decreases with speed, and is primarily a function of the tires and the wheelbase. Long-wheelbase cars with big tires have more yaw damping. Short-wheelbase cars can feel &amp;quot;squirrelly&amp;quot; at high speed.   High side forces, or ultimate cornering adhesion. One of the easiest and most common measures of &amp;quot;handling,&amp;quot; yet only one part of the whole picture. This is good for lateral-g-force bragging-rights for street cars, but rarely used on the road, even in emergencies. However, it is critical for race cars because it is used on every corner.   Satisfactory skidding characteristics: adequate skid warning, gradual rear breakaway and easy natural recovery. With very few exceptions, wide tires have more abrupt breakaway characteristics and are less forgiving for use on the road. In racing, the levels of driving and of concentration are much higher, and cars with less skid warning are still acceptable.   Minimum change in behavior with braking and acceleration. Load shift to the front wheels (on lift-throttle or braking) tightens the turn, while acceleration (except rear wheelspin) straightens the turn. Many of today&amp;#039;s street cars have had these &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; effects tuned out completely by careful design. Steering with the throttle is fun, but too much and the car might be virtually uncontrollable.   To sum up, handling has many dimensions. It&amp;#039;s really too simplistic to talk about &amp;quot;good handling&amp;quot; in an overall sense. It&amp;#039;s all about compromises and a good balance of handling design factors for the intended purpose of the car. \u2014 Doug Milliken   RacePak Data Systems   Competition Systems, Incorporated (CSI), the parent company of RacePak Data Systems, was founded in 1984 by engineers Spencer Eisenbarth (left) and Ron Armstrong. From their work with data acquisition for a racing hydroplane boat came the seed for their development of a robust onboard data logger.   Eighteen years later, RacePak supports teams in NHRA, NASCAR and other venues, with systems designed for automobiles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, personal watercraft and industrial applications.   RacePak&amp;#039;s current array of components needs only one cable to connect everything on what they call V-Net. Each component can be connected in a daisy chain, eliminating the usual rat&amp;#039;s nest of wires.   RacePak has all the sensors to measure a vehicle&amp;#039;s performance, as well as its health. Professional-level systems are capable of sampling oil pressure or anything else 1000 times per second.   Its newest gizmo uses Global Positioning System technology, a powerful tool capable of providing a vehicle&amp;#039;s instantaneous speed, direction and location. Unlike the conventional methods to measure speed and lateral acceleration, the GPS approach is decoupled from the body roll and wheelspin that plague traditional measuring devices.   For R&amp;amp;amp;T, the RacePak system is not only convenient, but also extremely informative in quantifying a vehicle&amp;#039;s dynamic performance, giving readers an in-depth analysis of what it really means to have the best-handling car. \u2014 Shaun Bailey "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a18602/great-grip-ssi-test-meet-bryan-herta/>