1/4 Mile Testing is Obsolete

Thank you for the clarification. 

NOHOME said:

It is just a  convenient yardstick that has been established over many years. People can relate to it.  People can visualize it. It sells car magazines and it sells cars.

Just because your yardstick measures 36 inches, you don't have to use all of them everytime you measure something.

 

 

I buy oil in 5 quart jugs. I can easily visualize that quantity.

But when I refill my engine after an oil change, I measure it out in liters, because I can do it more accurately.

Quarter mile times are just a useful frame of reference, based on years and years of data. Adding math in this case makes things needlessly complex.

I want to see 60ft times and 1/8 mile times on road tests to see how quick a car is in the real world, not in a 1/4 mile world that does not exist.

A guy can dream right?

Don't get me started on the Lightning Lap stuff where the the times are a combination of all season, summer and r compound rubber. Be interesting to see what some of the "slow" cars do on race rubber. Or what some of the "fast" cars do on normal street tires. And are the "fast" cars on r compounds also running custom alignment settings vs the "slow" cars. 

I think the 1/4 is interesting because of how it separates types of power. Tesla stomp anything in the 1/4 but when you look at trap speed you realize how much power a Chiron has. The Jason Cammisa drag videos are interesting for that reason. Watch the Tesla Plaid rocket off the line and then watch how quickly the Bugatti is closing the gap at the end. You can start to understand what each car would feel like. 
 

Maybe it's not directly applicable, but as a metric of comparison it's even better than 0-60 imo. 

How big is the average roundabout? That's all I have to test on since my town just built its first one.

Patrick said:

As a drag racer, this is a bad take

This.

It's a standard. It's achievable (I had a friend with his stock civic put his hands on his hips and tell us "I'm gonna go highway speeds." He went 88mph), it's cheap fun, it keeps the kids I turn them onto from racing on the streets...I could probably go on.

In reply to alfadriver :

You live in one of the very few nations that can not understand metric. How many people do you know that can relate to 223710 Watts  from their Lsx when bench racing? HP and 1/4 mile standards are pretty much ingrained into the nations mind. Why change?

SkinnyG (Forum Supporter) said:

I like 0-60. 

It's a practical application that I use every day.

My current daily does 0-60, so that's good.

0-60 is a terrible metric for two reasons.  One is that with a top speed that low it places a HUGE emphasis on the ability to launch the car.  AWD and launch control can shave a whole second or more off a 0-60 time without really making any difference in the real world.  The other reason is that being speed-based (rather than distance-based), the transmission ratios matter a lot.  A car that does 61 mph in 2nd will lose a second or so (well, a manual one will) off the 0-60 time if you change the rear end ratio so that 2nd now redlines at 59 mph and it has to shift to third, this despite the fact that the slightly shorter ratio means the is probably actually slightly faster in the real world.

1/8 mile times have the same problem with launch control sensitivity that 0-60 does.

1/4 mile time (or, even better, trap speed) is a useful yardstick.  Sure, nobody does a standing quarter mile except a drag racer, but it's about the best single number metric of how a car is going to accelerate that there is.

Even though the British are metric the still talk about 0-60 times. 

In reply to DrMikeCSI :

0-62 over there.

1/4 mile is important because its established, so you have a frame of reference going back decades, and it tells you multiple things.

The ET can be a combination of things like traction, weight, power and aero, the trap speed pretty much takes traction and driver quality out of the equation (for stuff magazines are actually testing), and the two numbers relationship give you a good idea on how it actually gets to those times. Low ET and low trap, its efficient and has good traction, high et for the trap speed, its all power.

I think it gives you a much better overall picture of acceleration than a 0-60 time does. Companies are so focused on 0-60 times they do things to maximize performance on that metric, so it looks like it performs better than it does, 1/4 mile times will show you how fast it actually is.

Plus 0-60 and 1/8 times are smaller so you loose some resolution.

SV reX said:

I like 1/4 mile as a comparison to the cars I build and take to the track. 
 

"Well damn!  All that friggen work, and I still can't outrun a Kia Sephia!"

I use it to talk about all my old cars, like "I love my Porsche 924s, but it would get smoked in the quarter by a late-model Honda Odyssey"

NOHOME said:

In reply to alfadriver :

You live in one of the very few nations that can not understand metric. How many people do you know that can relate to 223710 Watts  from their Lsx when bench racing? HP and 1/4 mile standards are pretty much ingrained into the nations mind. Why change?

I still don't mean what you are getting at- HP and Watts measure the same thing- just different units.  To be offended by one is peculiar.  Again, I get watts being a better measurement, but power is power, regardless of the unit.  

The fact that new cars are so fast is one of the biggest reasons why the 1/4 is more relevant than the 1/8. That second eighth of a mile is where the real separation happens. It's a more complete measure of the vehicle's acceleration. When everything is fast, tenths matter, and it's very possible to have two cars run the same time in the 1/8 but have one pull away in the 1/4. The 1/8 is too launch dependent.

The fact that the 1/4 involves extralegal speeds is meaningless. It always has. My 85 Honda Accord ran mid 18s at around 75 mph when I took it to Milan Dragway in 1989. That was a slow car, even then, but the national maximum speed limit was 65.

That is my whole point, 99.9% never do past a 1/8 mile (90mph) in acceleration anymore. Who really cares how fast a car is after 80mph unless you are actually on a drag strip. If a car can get off the line from a stop quick that is the kind of thing I like to know. If the car has launch control that is not a handicap, it is a bonus that allows you to extract everything the car has to offer in some cases. 0-80 is all anyone ever really does so anything above that is purely bragging about a meaningless number (actual drag racers on a track exempt from this statement)

I know that you don't mean it this way, and your logic is explained well, but I can't help but have an emotional reaction to this. It feels a bit like, "It's not relevant to me, so everyone should stop using it." 

It's hard to abandon a standard of measurement that's been used for decades. I can look at the data from a hemi challenger from 1970 and take the limitation of launching the car on bias ply tires and still be able to look at trap speed as an additional data point. The useful information is still there. 
 

It gives us a way to compare performance across more than a half century of automotive production. 
 

Vehicle weights get published, and I'm confident that the average buyer pays no attention to that. 

Appleseed said:

Quarter mile is an arbitrary measurement, like 40 steps. But it's an Important one. 1/4 is a 1/4. With STP adjustments, its universal. When GRM says that a car did a lap at VIR in 1:45, I have no idea what that means. I pulled that time out of my ass. I have no idea if its fast, or slow, or impossible. Maybe that's slow at VIR, but fast at Gingerman. But a Swede does 11.30 in Stockholm, and a Neleson does 10.56, well I know what that means in comparison, even though the two cars are in completely different parts of the world.

Which is why I wish GRM would do skid pad testing. A 200ft circle is a 200ft circle. If you modify a Miata and it picks up 0.2 on a skid pad, that's relatable whether you're in California or Rhode Island. Times at specific tracks, tracks I'll never visit, are completely unrelatable.

Car and Driver used to do the skid pad testing.  Maybe still do but I don't subscribe anymore since I subscribed to GrassRoots MotorSports 20 years ago or so.

In reply to Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) :

100% on the money, I agree that it's even more relevant now with all the 300hp FWD cars. They'll all have poor 1/8th mile times but the trap speeds give you a good indication of passing power on the highway.

Rolling 30-75mph time would be nice measurement when reviewing pedestrian cars. My Expedition 30-70 seems to be faster than our Honda Accord's. Since I have to merge onto I95 and punch it every time, this matters to me lol. But I also like 70-20mph braking since as soon as we blend into traffic, BOOM traffic jam lol. 

I'm sick and tired of these pansy-assed testers who just use the manufacture's or estimated top speed data. Prove it.

Quarter mile testing is outdated, man. Only folks that hit the drag strip really care about that. And that's not even a real-world environment! Plus, if you're caught pushing your ride to those limits on the street, the penalties are brutal. Most cars on the road today can easily hit 90-110 mph in a quarter mile, but who's actually gonna risk it?

So why are car magazines and testing sites still stuck on this 1/4 mile BS? It's time to switch it up and start measuring 1/8 mile times. At least that's something people can actually accomplish at random stop lights or when merging onto the highway. And with cars today going 25-30 mph faster than they did 30 years ago, it's time to adapt to the times. So, I'm with you on this, let's leave the 1/4 mile in the past and move on to something more realistic.

They should publish the time it takes to complete a left hand turn with an advance green light. Few can do this in under 30 seconds from what I have observed. 

I'm curious about the age demographics of the 1/8 vs 1/4 mile debaters. I'm not trying to make this an age thing, but I think it would be useful to understand the perspective of both sides. 

As a 50ish year old engineer, I think the 1/4 mile offers benefit over shorter distances.

I suspect a lot of variation between vehicles would be lost in the measurement noise at 1/8 mile (or 0-60), while 1/4 mile offers a bit more time to see the difference between vehicles. The combination of ET and Trap speed can tell a lot about the car without having to graph acceleration over the length of the run. 

DeadSkunk (Warren) said:

A 200 foot circle is always a 200 foot circle. Still fairly meaningless because the surface isn't always the same. All these magazine measurements are just ballpark numbers dependent on the surface they are measured on, including the drag strip..

^This^! I've seen 7-point drops asphalt to concrete. I've seen multiple point drops concrete to concrete.

How about 0-100-0 times?