67
“WE WERE
DRIVING
IT PRETTY
AGGRESSIVELY
ON A REALLY
DEMANDING
ROAD.”“WE WERE
DOING A LOT
OF HARD
BRAKING
AND HARD
CORNERING.
IT PICKED UP
THE CORNERS
REALLY WELL.
YOU GET
SOME NICE
NOISE
FROM THE
ENGINE.”little bit. Under hard braking, setting up to go through a
curve, the rear end gets a little light. Going around corners,
depending on the road surface, on the bumps it gets a little
front-heavy. The transmission feels good. And if you’re going
to run a car hard like that in the mountains, you’re going to
need bigger, better brakes.”
“We were driving it pretty aggressively on a really de-
manding road,” Sutton says. “We were doing a lot of hard
acceleration and hard braking and hard cornering, and like
Jim said, it picked up the corners really well. The cabin is
comfortable and reasonably quiet, and you get some nice
acceleration noise from the engine.”
As the Original Venice Crew works primarily with
naturally aspirated engines, we’re interested in their
opinions of the Stinger’s small-displacement, twin-turbo
setup. Is there something inherently dishonest in the tur-
bocharger?
“I don’t think it’s a cheat,” Marietta says. “Even though
I’m not a tree-hugger environmentalist, it does make sense
to get more horsepower without having to get a bigger
engine and pump more fuel through it. I was favorably
impressed because I thought it had a lot of grunt right out
of the box. I didn’t feel much turbo lag. They seem to have
found a way to correct that.”
“It has quite a bit of grunt down below,” Sutton agrees,
“and it kept hammering on and didn’t fall off.”
No surprise, the Original Venice Crew has little patience
for the Stinger’s electronic nannies. “One thing I would
change,” Marietta says, “or turn off as soon as I could, is
all the stay-in-your-lane, don’t-do-this—the ‘mommy car’
is not what you want, because it really is
distracting when you hear those things or
feel the little tug at the wheel. I’m here. I
know what I’m doing.
“The head-up display is distracting,” he
adds. “I looked through it right away—I didn’t
see it until you brought it to my attention
because I’m focusing on what I’m doing,
especially on those roads. You need to focus.
We weren’t out there for a sightseeing tour.”
It becomes apparent that the OVC sees
the Kia Stinger as a potential project. “I
think we could find some ways to improve
it,” Sutton says. “We don’t know how good that air-to-air
intercooler is. I think because this is a production car,
there are a lot of things we could do to get the air in there
a bit quicker and less turbulent. I didn’t look to see if the
brakes were cooled, but we’d definitely put coolers in.
Probably not the water spritzers, but at least air coolers.
“It’s a nice little car. Feels good, feels solid. But I think
we could up its game.” AMOVC and
Automobile
discuss old
school vs. new
school over
burgers. The
boys were
favorably
impressed by
our Stinger.