Eclectic Avenue

FIVE COUNTRIES, 12 CRAZY-FAST VEHICLES, ONE WINNER

- Mark Rechtin, Jonny Lieberman

Each year’s Best Driver’s Car field takes a different form. Last year, the story revolved around the three supercars that obliterated the existing WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca lap record for a street-legal vehicle. We also had the first-ever SUV in the field.

Often, Best Driver’s Car is a roster of that year’s two-door exotics. This year was … different. Sure, we had the equivalent of a street-legal race car in the McLaren Senna, which would take last year’s lap record and leave it in the marbles. (Spoiler alert much?) But we also had a collection of more, shall we say, eclectic vehicles, including an SUV whose performance would have shattered the BDC field five years ago. We had a couple grand tourers in the venerable sense, some Bahn-storming supersedans, and a certain tire-melting hooligan from Detroit that readers have begged us to include for years.

The 2020 Best Driver’s Car field priced out at $2,759,014. Granted, a cool million of that figure was the Senna, but although many of the sticker prices resided in the six-figure realm of the One Percent, we also had a couple vehicles reachable by The Rest Of Us. And as we all know, rooting for the underdog can be so much more fun.