WAR OF THE WORLDS
“Randy’s just gone off Turn 2,” the walkie-talkie barks. I look up from my laptop. What happened? Our Jaguar I-Pace is most definitely in the wrong place and has come to a stop amid drifting dust.
Today is just getting weirder and weirder—Randy Franklin Pobst never goes off a racetrack. For all the tire marks that spaghetti away from the Streets of Willow’s racing line and loopily disappear at its broken edges, they’re never the graffiti of our resident championship racing driver. Randy is a model of consistency.
A walkie-talkie hisses for a moment, and then … “The Jag suddenly put on its emergency brakes and sent me off the track.” Wait, what? The Motor Trend testing staffers eyeball each other. For the past two hours, Randy had been chasing software curveballs. Even through the metallic fidelity of our Motorolas, the terseness in his voice says he’s getting a little weary of it.
“At least it wasn’t just us,” mutters a Tesla-hatted voice behind me. Earlier, the Tesla Model 3 Performance with Track mode didn’t exactly stop as planned approaching Turn 10, going straight off at 90 mph, then bouncing through the bumpy desert terrain and sagebrush before re-entering the front straight and rolling into the pits, with a blown left rear tire courtesy of its off-road excursion.
We expected some surprises today. Bringing together two trackable battery-electric vehicles to challenge the best classical internal combustion sport sedan in the world right now—the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio—would be the beginning of a battle for the ages. Who knew it would also wind up a battle in the sages?
Let’s rewind the clouds of dust to earlier this morning.
It’s 8 a.m. in the California high desert, and already the sun has our asphalt stage brightly lit. To our left is “Big Willow” with its white-knuckle turns and village of backstage garages and paddocks needed for
