Sorry to be a bit boring, but I've only just caught up with this thread, so..... going back to the original question of is 0-60 in 9 secs pants (when the book quotes 8 seconds or whatever) what you have to bare in mind is how the manufacturer or test driver extracts these published figures from a car.
I seriously doubt that anyone here has ever equalled or bettered a published figure with a standard car, because no-one would ever drive their own car like a test driver drives a manufacturers test or press car.
These cars really are caned and caned and caned to get the best possible figures from them. Unless you are best friends with Mr Clutch, I doubt that you use the same standing start technique as a test driver, and if you have one ounce of mechanical sympathy in your body, then 1 second adrift from a manufacturers claims really isn't that bad at all.
There are obvious exceptions to this rule (like when a manufacturer publishes figures for a given car, that every car mag in the country then go out and smash, and then proclaim as a much faster car than previously imagined, sneaky manufacturers, eh?) but on the whole those figures are unrepeatable in the real world. But its ok, because that applies to every make and model of car, as they are all tested in the same way.
