ABDC: Pitched perfect

Australia's Best Driver's Car
The verdict

>> What is Australia's Best Driver's Car?

Porsche’s Cayman GTS is the winner of the first motoring.com.au Australia’s Best Driver’s Car (ABDC).

Why? Put simply, it was rated higher across ABDC's eight key engagement categories than any of the other 14 cars we assembled for our Tasmania trial. In fact, every judge that scored the GTS gave it at least six five out of fives. In scoring terms, that’s a remarkable result — no other car came close

But it was a surprisingly tough decision – and what’s intriguing is that not one of our judges nominated the Porsche as their ‘favourite’. No, not even me…

As a 911 GT3 owner, our single female tester Nadine Armstrong nominated the Nissan GT-R as her favourite, yet scored the Cayman GTS as close to perfect as anyone could.

Our race-testers Luke Youlden and Greg Crick nominated the Jaguar F-TYPE R and Mercedes-AMG A 45 as their respective favourites but were equally demonstrative in their scoring of the Porsche. Marton P, in love with the other GTS (HSV’s), still scored the Cayman as his top driver’s car.

It was a familiar pattern…. Given my penchant for racing Meganes, I’ll let you guess which car was my favourite, yet I too gave the Porsche the nod.

Simply, the Cayman GTS is the most accomplished, most polished and, in the right hands, the most potent and involving point-to-point driver’s car here. Even a seriously average set of tyres (at least in wet-road terms) couldn’t hide that fact.

Yours truly had more 'moments' in the Cayman (thanks to the Pirellis fitted) than in any other car on test – more even than the near slick-shod, over-powered and over-weight Nissan GT-R. But the terrible weather conditions and unsuitable rubber only served to highlight the absolute precision, tactility and drivability of the Cayman GTS.

Drivers are fed with amazing amounts of information both via hands and bum in the Cayman. It was possible to drive up to the very limit of adhesion and know almost preternaturally where the edge existed. When it was safe to overstep the mark I did, and the car was right – the edge was exactly where it said it was.

Surely, this is the measure of a true driver’s car.

On dry roads, the GTS came to life – in all its precise, grippy, fast and fulsome glory. Perfectly positioned, controls to hand just so, it produced grins and consistent pace like no other car here.  Other cars here may have fared better over a drier test period, but we’re confident that none would have bettered the Cayman GTS.

Yes, it is that good…

The relatively small engine Porsche was no slouch in our straight-line tests either. You can argue the point whether it has a soundtrack that excites (I’m on the positive side of that ledger, but a number of my colleagues aren’t) but you can’t argue with V-Box verified numbers.

As always, we eschewed launch control (owners simply do not use it!) and performed what we call ‘fast street starts’ at the dragstrip. Under these ‘rules’, with two people onboard each vehicle (Youlden driving and Road Test Editor, Brogan), the Cayman GTS was equal second fastest to 100km/h and third fastest over the standing 400m. It does not lack mumbo.

The idiot-proof and yet delightful to use twin-clutch PDK gearbox must take some credit for the GTS’s giant-taming performance. We’d have once said a driver’s car must have manual gearbox. Now we’re not so sure.

The second-placed Mercedes-AMG A 45 was fast and fuss-free from the moment it rolled off the Spirit. It won friends on the road and on the track and was consistently high scored. Just not as high as the Porsche.

The Jaguar was an aural standout but in the end could not match the precision of the Porsche.

The biggest surprise packages were the smallest cars on Australia's Best Driver’s Car – the fourth-placed Audi S1 Sportback and fifth-finishing Ford Fiesta ST.

At $25,990 the ST is a bargain and delivers thrills, feedback and smiles that cars twice the price struggle to generate. We love this car and hope desperately that Ford can generate the same amount of personality in the potentially epic Focus RS. An early tip for 2016, perhaps?

The S1 was not our initial choice from the Audi line-up but more than justified its place in the field. After five or six sodden laps of Baskerville I was amazed at its balance and playful persona. Let’s hope next year there’s another Audi with the same potential.

Some big reputations came away from ABDC bruised and battered. The combination of poor weather and a spectrum of roads and surface was telling. There will be fallout but we have to call things as we see them.

Some of you will ask if the disconnect between ‘favourite’ cars and the car voted as the winner calls into question our ABDC process. I don’t think so. Rather I think it speaks volumes for the professionalism and application of the judging team. Each one of them analysed the cars they drove and, putting personal favourites aside, scored the cars against the criteria as outlined.

Congratulations Porsche… the Cayman GTS is motoring.com.au’s inaugural Australia’s Best Driver’s Car.