Tested: How Fast Your Car Needs to Be to Outrun a Cop

From the September 2017 issue

You’re watching TV, a show is on with a name like America’s Most Inbred: High-Speed Pursuits, and you notice a trend. Anytime you see a police chase, the fugitive is driving a vehicle woefully inadequate for the task. There is a 100 percent certainty that if you see a Pontiac LeMans in a police chase, it’s the crappy Daewoo-sourced hatchback from the 1980s. You almost never see anything good making a desperate run for it.

Ah, but what if? At what point do you have a car that’s fast enough to actually outrun the police? To find out, we’d need a collection of variously capable civilian machines, plus a cop car, a cop-car driver, a track, Racelogic GPS-based data loggers, and handcuffs. Sure, we already had the handcuffs, but the rest of it took some doing. Nonetheless, one fine morning we convened at Carolina Motorsports Park (CMP) in Kershaw, South Carolina, to find out which cars are fit for a life of crime.

On the law-enforcement side, we chose the Dodge Charger Pursuit, possibly the most aggro police car ever built. The front-end styling alone would cause Pope Francis to break out in sweat. This car knows your secrets, and it can get them out of you the easy way or the hard way. But it would prefer the hard way.

With a 370-hp Hemi and upgraded brakes and suspension, this is the cop car you don’t want to tangle with—it holds the record for fastest lap in Michigan State Police testing at Grattan Raceway. To drive it, we recruited Greg Haas, who is not a cop. No, he’s the guy who teaches the cops how to drive. He can rip a J-turn in a Crown Vic while doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. We wouldn’t think to shortchange our Pursuit with some peach-fuzz greenhorn who’s never thrown a spike strip.

Our escape vehicles, in ascending order of bad-assery: the Toyota Yaris iA, the Volkswagen Golf GTI, the Chevrolet Camaro SS 1LE, and the Ferrari 488GTB. Carolina Motorsports Park is a 2.3-mile road course with crests and blind corners that replicate a country road. We’ll do a rolling start on the front straight, then see what happens over the course of a lap—our assumption being that if you haven’t made an escape within two miles, you’re probably not making one. In an experiment like this, you might expect that we’d gradually climb the ladder of performance. Instead, we decided to get the obvious ones, fast and slow, out of the way first.

The Yaris iA looked sad about being caught even before it was caught, which happened almost immediately.

Toyota Yaris iA

It’s a rebadged Mazda 2. It has 106 horsepower. And it’s a great way to end up in jail!

We included the Yaris iA as a baseline, a representative of the caliber of hardware that you’d normally see in a police chase. Even the burgundy hue of its paint seems calculated to temper our expectations. “It’s a color that says, ‘I’m not ready for full-on red, but I’m a sporty fellow,’ ” says Haas.

After a lap to get rolling, we hit the front straight with the belligerent Charger filling the Yaris’s mirrors. It’s hard to overstate the level of anxiety surrounding the events that follow. The blue and red lights go on behind me and, for the first time in my life, I do something other than pull to the shoulder. It feels so unnatural to open the throttle instead of hitting the brakes. The act of fleeing, of indulging the taboo, unleashes a torrent of adrenaline that has me thinking, for a moment, that maybe I can whip this horse hard enough to make my escape. Sudden-onset bad judgment is a disease to which I’m far from immune, and surely the root cause of most police chases.

With my nervous system short-circuited by dreams of freedom, I drive way too deep into the first corner, skid off, and plow into the overrun area in a geyser of sand. From the moment the lights went on to the moment I went off: 10 seconds. You can be as cool as you like, but a lit-up Charger in your rearview mirror would turn Norm MacDonald into Bobcat Goldthwait.

We finish the lap and I discover that the little Yaris is actually hilarious on the track, given to huge lift-throttle drifts. Sure, those drifts happen at 40 mph, but style points must count for something. Nonetheless, the data confirms that it isn’t much of a fight: The Charger catches the Yaris in three seconds.

Verdict: Call your bail bondsman.

Ferrari 488GTB

Is the 661-hp Ferrari 488GTB quicker than a police car? Sure, that’s the way the numbers look, but we figured we’d better get them both on the track and drive around real fast just to check. Fun fact: There is a huge gold mine just down the road from CMP, and, after a few laps in the 488, I wish I owned it. At the current price of gold, I’d need to set aside about 18 pounds to secure this particular ­Ferrari. Where’s my pickax?

A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that Ferrari would build anything faster than the 458. But it always does, and the 488GTB is a whole new kind of quick. Apparently, its Fiorano lap time beats the 458 Speciale’s by half a second, but I’d wager that its zMAX Dragway elapsed time would torch most anything this side of a Bugatti Chiron. Ferrari quotes a zero-to-124-mph time of 8.3 seconds. Yowza.

When the Charger’s light bar comes to life, the 488 puts on a show of its own, the red LEDs across the top of the steering wheel firing left to right to signal the imminent need to pull the upshift paddle. The 3.9-liter V-8 revs so quickly—BLAAP! BLAAAAP! BLAAAAAAAP!—that you pull that paddle like a kayaker fighting the Saltstraumen tides. In a lesser car, you might worry about what’s behind you, but in the 488 you’re consumed with the constant onslaught of corners. What happened to the straights?

The 488’s chassis can handle the power, with colossal carbon-ceramic brakes, gluey Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s, and an electronically controlled limited-slip differential that makes you feel like a driving god. Exiting a 70-mph corner about halfway through the lap, the 488’s tail slides gently wide, scribing twin stripes on the pavement. For our distant pursuing officer, they’re graffiti by an unseen artist, a Banksy in rubber.

In our made-up escape, you’d need to get only far enough away to pull up behind some bushes as the cop car flies past. By the end of a lap, the 488GTB is so far ahead you could have it valet parked.

Verdict: The rich get away with everything.

Chevrolet Camaro SS 1LE

Doesn’t “1LE” sound like something you’d yell to call a hog? “WONN-ELLL-EEEEE! Slop’s in the trough!” Maybe it’s not the catchiest nomenclature, but that alphanumeric signifies a Camaro with all the track-slaying accouterments—magnetic ride control, six-piston Brembos up front, and an electronically controlled limited-slip diff. It’s a Camaro that’ll pull more than 1.00 g in a turn. Civilians catalog the tells for police vehicles, like steelies on an Explorer, but maybe this could work the other way around: Cops should know that a matte-black hood signals the 1LE, a Camaro that will smelt any municipal ore barge.

Armed with GM’s Performance Traction Management, the 1LE makes it easy for the driver to simply flatten the throttle at corner exit and let that trick diff and sophisticated traction control figure out the rest. I also indulge the six-speed manual’s rev-match feature on downshifts, freeing mental bandwidth that can be devoted to steering, braking, and humming my favorite Dokken song.

The Camaro pulls the Charger on the straights, but the corners are where it really leaves it for dead. The good ship Charger, with 18-inch steel wheels, Goodyear Eagle RS-A all-season tires, and intrusive stability control (apparently this cop car can’t do donuts), is more than a quarter-mile back after one lap. That distance will allow you to cut into the alley behind your favorite vape shop until the heat dies down.

Verdict: You’ll probably go to jail, but not for this.

Volkswagen Golf GTI

This car would appear to be our over-under proposition. At 220 horsepower, the GTI is down a full 150 horses on the Charger. But with the Sport trim’s limited-slip differential and Golf R brakes, the agile VW should make up time in the tight sections. Will that be enough to outrun Johnny Law?
Beyond the first two corners, the answer begins to crystallize. The GTI digs in and pivots under braking, then puts down everything it’s got on the way past the apex. It doesn’t look like much on paper, but this thing is a real-world ass-hauler. I glance in the rearview and see the big Dodge barreling down behind me, rear axle twitching in anticipation of the straight, just hating the corner. If we were on Route 318 in Nevada, with straights for days, the Charger would be spinning me by now. And if this were Tail of the Dragon, the Charger would last about three corners before my taillights disappeared for good.

Here’s the thing, though. Most roads aren’t that extreme either way, and CMP strikes a realistic middle ground. So while I bank time on the corners, I give it up on the straights. The big Dodge isn’t reeling me in, but I’m not getting rid of it, either. After one lap, I have a modest six-second lead. Is that enough?

I guess it depends. If there’s a fork in the road, maybe six seconds and a lucky coin toss would see you through. But unless you’ve got a lot more road, you’re probably screwed.

Verdict: You better hope the chase takes you through an autocross course.

Chase Enders: Police Spike Strips Tested!

To outrun a cop, you don’t just need something quicker than a cop car. You need something a lot quicker.

And even then, you’re in for a world of hurt. Cops have radios and helicopters and colleagues who would be glad to park their own Chargers across your path. They have dash cams that record your plate, and some of them even have sticky-locator-dart cannons they can fire at your bumper. Even if you escape, modern police technology practically ensures that your freedom is only temporary.

Thus, silly track exercises aside, our official advice is to pull over and plead for mercy. Especially if you’re in a Yaris.

Running from the Law

The graph doesn’t lie: The Dodge Charger Pursuit occasionally closes the gap on the 488GTB and the Camaro SS 1LE, but that’s only because those cars are so far ahead. With such a large lead, the Ferrari and Chevy are often cornering while the Pursuit is charging down a straight.