![]() ![]() The problem was this: The Panoz Esperante GTS is racing's equivalent of the man without a country. Both guys are experienced drivers, and both have been campaigning the GTS long enough to know how to extract the best from their cars. ![]() They weren't quite as slow as I was, but they were almost as far from the front of the grid. But so were the two Panoz owners, Gary Curtis, from suburban Minneapolis, and Bob Deeks, from Cleveland. Croquet, maybe, or needlepoint.īut this isn't quite as humiliating as it seems. A disparity of that magnitude makes a racer consider other pastimes. That personal-best lap was almost 25 seconds slower than the fastest car in the session, a Mustang that was competing in the same class-GT1-as the Panoz. My lips were parched before I finally found my number down there near the bottom. For that one golden moment, I felt like Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront-"I coulda been a contendah." Then a member of the Panoz crew turned up with a sheet listing all the lap times from the session. It was the 46th-annual June Sprints, arguably the best weekend of amateur road racing this side of the SCCA's national championship runoffs-big racing fields, close competition, and the best bratwurst on the continent.Īh, sweet ignorance. This was no obscure club race in South Snowshoe, either. Not only was the car easy and forgiving to drive, but I found I was within a second of the two other Panoz cars on hand for the event. When I checked the lap times from my first practice session in this distinctive racing coupe-my best was 2:37.182, or 91.613 mph-and learned that I was getting around the circuit some 14 seconds faster than I'd gone in a variety of other cars on this course, you could say I found it gratifying. Quite the contrary: Racers are among the world's foremost adrenaline junkies. In the slower cars we've taken to past Sports Car Club of America races at this circuit, the time consumed covering those same long straights borders on boredom, which isn't what your average club racer is after. And speed is exactly what's required to make this classic four-mile Wisconsin road course really interesting. But it's still fast enough to require one's undivided attention, even on a racetrack such as Road America, with its long foot-on-the-floor straightaways. That's not exactly light speed we regularly test street cars capable of more. At 5500 rpm in fifth gear, a Panoz Esperante GTS is traveling at about 140 mph. ![]()
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