O.K., I give up Ned Flanders... In retrospect, I don't know how I've made it to 40 without a wreck, since by virtue of having some track experience, I must be a menace to society and WAY too over-confident on the road.
Defensive driving is not a cure-all, it's not a replacement for knowing how to handle a car at its limits. Being a skilled driver, from a performance standpoint, does not default to being a reckless driver on the street. That's a completely different matter.
Fact is, you can be the most defensive-driver in the world, and you're not going to anticipate a truck-tire explosion directly in front of you on a busy interstate. You're not going see that drunk driver running a blind stop sign until the very-last-nano-second. The fact that the road IS a very uncontrolled environment only amplifies the advantages of having a high-performance car (in all aspects, not just straight-line), and knowing how to use it at its limits. When bad **** happens, that no level of defensive driving or divine premonition can anticipate, one's understanding and familiarity of the car's limits and abilities is often the difference between safe avoidance or a deadly barrel-roll, or sliding off the road into who-knows-what. Numerous times in my life, the car I was in, and my ability to use it, was the sliver of difference that kept me from being swept-up by an oblivious road-troll or tire carcass.
I'm not condoning reckless driving on busy streets. For people that live in metropolitan areas where traffic and congestion and pedestrians are a fact of driving, I can understand the trepidation. But for alot of us, we frequent stretches of road where the only living beings at-risk are ourselves, and whatever Racoons, Possums, Armodillos and deer may be in the general vicinity.
If you want a high-performance car, but you're not really into pushing it to any limits, be it a race track or not, go ahead and have fun, who cares? But don't be so presumptuous to tell others that all that matters with the car is banging a couple gears leaving the Steak & Shake within your own tiny realm of driving...
If you want to buy a Bazooka to shoot tin cans off a fence post in your back yard, more power to you.
But don't insinuate that those who have high performance cars, that actually USE them on occassion, that actually DO learn and enjoy the limits, actually DO keep safety and respect for others at the top of their minds, are irrelevant, unsafe and menaces to society. I see it on the road all the time, people who don't know any more about driving than what it takes to run with the cow herd through town, horrified by anyone who can navigate that herd more efficiently, assuming "that's just unSAFE!!", when they don't even know where their front bumper terminates within a standard-deviation of 10-flippin-feet.
In almost all SUV roll-overs, often deadly, the biggest contributing factor is, once the situation presents itself (tire blow-out, sudden obstacle avoidance), the driver is ill-prepared and completely un-skilled. They die much in part due to incompetence/panic, defensive-strategy be-damned.
Any-hoo, this thread's spinning WILDLY out of control, much due in-part to my rambling to be sure.
Yes, in today's world, opportunities to safely explore high-ability cars at speeds exceeding 70-90 mph are rare, and you really don't get a chance to "use" your vehicle in the manner it was designed to perform. I can't argue that.
But I maintain that it's just dumb to then relegate the measuring and comparing of such vehicles to the restraints of the "street", i.e. 0-60 times. Just because driving in the U.S. generally stinks, doesn't mean we hold everything within that context, and forget what a car can ACTUALLY DO if you were to really unleash the sucker, and get outside of the city limits, or onto a good track.
Buying an extreme-performance vehicle, you would hope, that you actually get to USE it from time-to-time, in a safe manner, whatever venue that requires.
But if you're buying it simply for "bragging rights", "looks", and being the first egomaniac on the block.... There's a word for that: posing.
There are thousands of old-farts diddling around the country in automatic-trannied Corvettes that support my assertion, but at least they're safe I suppose...