1/4 Mile Testing is Obsolete

I like 0-60. 

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

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

In reply to SkinnyG (Forum Supporter) :

Back in the early 80's the National speed limit was 55mph so a lot of the cars were advertised as 0-55mph cause they wouldn't want you to break the law.  Confusing and overall lame.

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 also think the fact that the 1/4 mile standard is something most folks won't do is a GOOD thing.  If they posted 1/8 mile times, it would encourage Joe Average to test it every chance he could on the street.

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.

In reply to Appleseed :

I agree. (And GRM has done skid pad challenges)

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.

As an engineer, I object to the term "horsepower" since "Watts" is a more meaningful concept. However, I have no mental feel for how much power is on tap if offered in kilowatts. So I stick with horsepower. Once again, I feel no moral obligation to use all of the power every time I use the car. 

As a drag racer, this is a bad take

In reply to 2023BD :

To be fair, was the number of people who actually do a 1/4 mile pass ever that high, at least compared to the population at large?

To me it's a number for enthusiasts, not necessarily the everyman, and that's what we've all kind of agreed on.  Just with something like boot up speeds on computers.  I don't really care once I get to a certain threshold, but there are those that it's a point of pride.

In reply to 2023BD :

99% of performance testing isn't used by drivers anyway. They are more bragging points. 

NOHOME said:

As an engineer, I object to the term "horsepower" since "Watts" is a more meaningful concept. However, I have no mental feel for how much power is on tap if offered in kilowatts. So I stick with horsepower. Once again, I feel no moral obligation to use all of the power every time I use the car. 

??? Can you clarify that?  Horsepower and Watts are units of the same thing. Just totally different units. Watts is easier to use, for sure. But we are all ruined on hp. 

1/4 mile is important. It makes it noticeably harder to come up with a good EV strategy for the challenge. 1/8th would be much easier.

In reply to 2023BD :

However, it's a metric that has been in use so long that we have decades of comparison data. So I argue it's still a valid benchmark in new car tests. 

It's a standard measure.

Wattage and HP have a direct linear correlation, 750 watts = 1 HP 75000 watts = 10HP etc.

I might get a wild hair and take the family minivan to the dragstrip. I'm far enough from the autobahn that having a sustainable top speed much over 100MPH is effectively irrelevant, but testing always includes (or repeats manufacturer info about) top speeds.

While we are at it, why not include 60ft times. Then you can see if the 1.9s time of a Yaris GR is quick enough to take a S550 Mustang from a stop light dig. Hint... in most case it is but the S550 will try to run it down but not before the next traffic light. My point is for real world actual everyday comparison the 60ft and 1/8 are what matters. 

Bragging rights and 1/4 mile times do help sell cars so I guess it will probably never change.

Literal applicability to the street shouldn't be a concern for any of this.

Some of it can tell you something about how quick a car is, but for the purposes of the street, tells you little about how it feels to exercise it. We're used to 1/4 mile, so as a rough gauge it's more useful because we have some rough idea of what it means for actual use squirting up an onramp. Rough.

It's like NOHOME says. I know the conversions, but the butt dyno doesn't guess in Watts. In much the same way that while I can usually recognize a 10 or 13mm nut (yeah, knowing it's on a BMW stops me guessing 1/2"), anything much larger I estimate in inches and feet.

2023BD said:

While we are at it, why not include 60ft times. Then you can see if the 1.9s time of a Yaris GR is quick enough to take a S550 Mustang from a stop light dig. Hint... in most case it is but the S550 will try to run it down but not before the next traffic light. My point is for real world actual everyday comparison the 60ft and 1/8 are what matters. 

Bragging rights and 1/4 mile times do help sell cars so I guess it will probably never change.

What about passing speed? Merging capability? Etc? Most of us have occasion to either merge onto a busy interstate, or make a tight pass on a two lane highway. The ability to go from legal-to supralegal speeds quickly is relevent in many of our daily lives.

Nobody lives their life 1/8 mile at a time though.

Plus the human variable.   Take one driver and make 10 passes and you will likely get 10 different times.  
      That's going to increase with a manual transmission.  And then there is weather.

  Air density changes,  sometimes a lot over a short period. The higher the air density the higher the horsepower made.  The faster the 1/4 mile times. 
      One final question?   Didn't NHRA change it from 1/4 mile to 1000 feet?   

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..

In reply to frenchyd :

NHRA went to 1000 feet for the pro classes. Other classes still run 1320 I think.

DeadSkunk (Warren) said:

In reply to frenchyd :

NHRA went to 1000 feet for the pro classes. Other classes still run 1320 I think.

All classes except top fuel & funny car still run 1320 feet.  They shortened those 2 to 1000' back in 2008 after a death (Scott Kalitta) as an attempt to slow things down and give an extra 320' worth of run off.

All the other pro NHRA classes are 1320. Some of the goofy ADRL bracket E36 M3 is 1000', as they run a mix of 1/8 and 1/4 cars together. But the vast majority of stuff is all still either an 1/8 or a 1/4.