If straight line speed is important to you...
...well, we're about to answer the $50,000 question!
In the American corner: Ford Mustang Mach-1!
In the Germa...panese corner, the Toyota Supra!
In the *actual* Japanese corner, the brand-new, twin-turbocharged Nissan Z!
...a 400-hp rear-wheel-drive legend whose computer won't let you do a burnout. Sigh.
No need to hit the fast forward button [burn!] because the action starts now!
You could call that an exact tie... except I'm not going to.
Because even though the two cars crossed the line at exactly the same time the Mustang was going 3 mph more quickly.
Off the line, I didn't know how it was going to go, because that thing's 78 extra horsepower
was eaten up by its 500 extra pounds.
but once the tires hooked up and its (dimwitted) 10-speed automatic finally figured out what to do...
...well, horsepower wins again.
Meanwhile the Supra is just an overachiever because the Supra is a BMW.
...and it does everything you ask of it every single time
So, it puts all the power down.
The hole-shot is perfect. Every shift is perfect.
Well, and here we are. [What a profound statement. Where else would we be?]
Doesn't hurt that it weighs 260 lb less than the Z.
That's really not all that far. [In reality, it's something like 34 feet.]
The Z's big issue is traction off the line.
Ford: Michelins Toyota: Michelins Nissan: [not particularly good] Bridgestones
The Z has launch control and it incinerates the rear tires....
(when the launch control works which isn't all that often.)
It burns out the whole way through first gear and then slam shifts into second (which is awesome)
and then bangs into third and keeps the wheelspin going...
...but by 60 mph, it's already 0.2 second behind the other two cars.
Then, it finally hooks up. That's where the horsepower kicks in and, well, it stays right behind them the rest of the way through the quarter mile.
[Cammisa unstops time.] (A funny concept because if he *actually* could stop time, maybe he wouldn't look so old and haggard.)
Ah that's all well and good, but there wasn't a clutch pedal in the bunch! [Good grief, here he goes with the stick-shift crap again.]
Luckily the 2023 Z is available with a six-speed manual!
It trades the automatic's complicated-to-engage launch control [basically it just denies your LC request when it feels like, also it requires a weird pull of BOTH paddles, and if you let go of one before the other, it throws the car into limp mode. Ask the idiot how he knows] in favor of a no lift shift program.
[Vacuum cleaner choking on a hairball.]
Unfortunately, it's very quiet thanks to a bunch of genuinely stupid drive-by noise regulations that penalize manual transmissions.
Nissan chose not to fix this problem the way Porsche has...
...by putting annoyingly long gear ratios in. (Yay, Nissan! Short Gears FTMFW!)
Instead they installed a very quiet muffler, and that is a very easy [and cheap!] thing to fix.
Nissan has assured me that if I fix this problem using a SAWZALL, they will take that SAWZALL to my genitalia. [Ew.]
So, I'll just leave this here and half this race will be very quiet. [Chicken sh...]
Thanks to that [short] gearing, the six-speed manual is only 0.3 seconds behind the nine-speed automatic to 60 mph — which is about the time it takes to make the one-two shift.
The lead grows to 0.5 second by the quarter because the Mercedes-sourced automatic's gears are shorter and more closely stacked.
As a result, the automatic car's rear wheels experience on average 10% more torque than the manual's over the course of the quarter mile. [This is without accounting for any additional losses in the AT or the MT's additional shift time: calculation based solely on gearing.]
So the Automatic Z wins by a small margin.
For the record, both the new Zs would have crucified Nissan's old 370Z.
The new Z is in an entirely different league of speed...
...one occupied by another two-seater that's exactly the same size.
...and the same horsepower!
...and the same torque!
...aaaaaahhhnd the same weight!!
...you know where this is going, right?
[SARCASM]
[Aston Martin V-8 making so much noise you literally can't even hear that new Z.]
One tenth of a second — and not a single mph apart — at the end of a quarter mile!
They could have called this the 470Z! [Get it? Because the Aston has a 4.7-liter?]
Well, there you have it. Or, as Captain Obvious might point out, adding two turbos to the Z gave it a lot of firepower.
...enough firepower, it turns out, to aaallmost keep up with an Aston Martin and a Ford Mustang Mach-1, and a notoriously overachieving BM-double-Yota.
However, most importantly, that's almost enough firepower that with nothing more
than a grippier set of tires, the Z would have been able to keep up with them all!