MZ6ZoomZoom said:
The 350Z sucks for the price and its class, on autocross. This has been shown MANY times (with even the MZ6 repeatedly beating them).
Ya, if you want to qualify it like that, then yes I will agree,
for the money, it's not the best autocross car you can buy. However, I'm highly skeptical about the 6 beating the Z if both are in the hands of good drivers. It's hard to make comparisons based on things you see at local events because the experience levels can vary so wildly. I mean, I've personally beaten plenty of WRX's in my stupid Civic, but I'm not about to say that my Civic is faster than a WRX, it's just that I have been doing it longer than those guys. I've seen well driven WRX's, too, and trust me, my Civic is no match for them.
I autocross in the Detroit Region SCCA. I saw two (+?) time national champion Matt Braun autocross a Mazda 6, and he only beat
me by half a second, and I am here to tell you that: A) I'm no national champion; and B) my car is in a slower class than the 6 to begin with.
Now if we could put Matt Braun in the Mazda 6 and, say, Steve Telehowski in the 350Z, we'd have a valid comparison. But culling results from a bunch of local events is not a fair way to compare cars.
Again, I'm not a national caliber driver, but I've been autocrossing long enough to know how things work, and this is how it is:
- if the 350Z really "sucked" for autocrossing, it would be in H-Stock like my Civic, not B-Stock like the Honda S2000 and Porsche Boxster. The SCCA knows enough about how to classify cars that they wouldn't make
that large of a mistake.
- No car in B-Stock sucks for autocrossing. They are all fast, it's just a matter of how they're driven. High powered RWD cars can look worse than they really are in the hands of a novice, just because they're sliding all over and spinning and stuff.