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" There is one good road in R&amp;amp;amp;T&amp;#039;s Michigan hometown. It winds along the Huron River, a nine-mile respite from the ruler-straight asphalt in our part of the state. It&amp;#039;s a perfect match for modern cars at speeds above 80 mph, but the legal limit is a whopping 35.  Luckily, a dozen of the world&amp;#039;s best tracks are within a day&amp;#039;s drive of the office. When it came time for a summer vacation, we chose a week&amp;#039;s worth and hit them in our favorite new fast car and jack-of-all-trades\u2014the BMW M6 Gran Coupe.  Call it a trackcation, or maybe a lapbatical. We call it heaven, right here in the middle.  When the photographer said we should meet at Road America at 4:45 a.m. to take sunrise pictures, I held the phone away from my ear, as if inspecting it for scorpions. I didn&amp;#039;t even know hours came in such small sizes. What about the risk of night vapors or werewolves slinking home?  It turned out to be a wonderful inconvenience. Everyone has a favorite track, and this is mine. I&amp;#039;ve come here since 1962, hitchhiking or bumming rides with friends&amp;#039; parents as a teen and later doing laps in my own and others&amp;#039; race cars. I love this place.  What&amp;#039;s so special about Road America? Well, it&amp;#039;s long and beautiful. Its four miles sweep through wooded hills of Wisconsin&amp;#039;s rugged Kettle Moraine region, so each lap feels like a small, scenic road trip through Happy Valley\u2014though a slightly hectic one, with accelerated tire wear. And then there&amp;#039;s charm and tradition. The track bratwurst stands are all run by churches and charitable clubs from nearby Plymouth and Elkhart Lake, the latter an elegant old summer resort village with Victorian hotels and shaded streets. It&amp;#039;s Henry James meets Roger Penske.   The track itself? Three long straights, connected by corners both fast and slow. The front straight leads into a fast first turn, then undulates into a friendly Turn Three that catches you like the hand of God and flings you into Hurry Downs, whose terminus smokes about $10 worth of brake pads each lap at Turn Five. Crest the blind hill, jink right, and you&amp;#039;re into the Serious Part.  The Carousel is one huge skidpad that shoots you down into the dreaded Kink, a fast and blind right where a bad line leads straight into the Armco. Survive that and you blitz along Kettle Bottoms and up Thunder Valley (sounds like the Tolkien landscape it really is), over another semiblind hill, then into a hard right onto the uphill front straight. When you flash under the flag bridge, you feel you&amp;#039;ve been somewhere satisfyingly far away.   The M6 Gran Coupe is a piece of work. I can&amp;#039;t remember feeling so instantly comfortable in a street car on a track. From the driver&amp;#039;s seat, it seems surprisingly nimble, almost like a 3-series. The precise six-speed and perfectly placed pedals make heel-and-toe shifting effortless. I was, in fact, congratulating myself on my beautiful whooping downshifts when I realized the car was actually matching revs for me, which it will do in the Sport setting. (Sport Plus, for true pros, takes away this ego-boosting marvel.)  The chassis and ride are so refined, the brutal strength of the twin-turbo, 7200-rpm V-8 almost seems like an unexpected dividend. It makes torque everywhere, yet shrieks freely up to eye-watering speeds. It&amp;#039;s a true 150-mph autobahn cruiser that seats five and is also a perfect track-day car. All you need is about $114,000. And a nice racetrack, with bratwurst, in the Kettle Moraine. \u2014Peter Egan    If you have balls and are in the right car, it&amp;#039;s almost certainly flat. Probably. Most people make the mistake of braking before Grattan Raceway&amp;#039;s blind jump, but that&amp;#039;s understandable. You can&amp;#039;t see squat past the rise in the pavement, and every lap, you casually wonder if what follows\u2014a deceptively fast ess that narrows right as your wheels touch down\u2014is still there. Or full of crashed or slow cars, which you would plow into before the car is settled enough to change direction. It&amp;#039;s like the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, only let&amp;#039;s be honest, the Corkscrew is just famous, not difficult, and the track saves you if you screw up. Here, if you so much as flinch, you rip off into the grass.   &amp;quot;You almost have to turn the car in midair,&amp;quot; an instructor once told me. &amp;quot;But that&amp;#039;s impossible,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s Grattan.&amp;quot;  Like a lot of old club tracks, Grattan wasn&amp;#039;t so much planned as randomly bulldozed into place. Its 2.0 miles hold 124 feet of elevation change, but a better illustration is to say that it looks like a faster version of the motocross track the owner built near the main gate. It&amp;#039;s a bonkers circus of 70-mph yumps and whoop-de-doos, and nearly every corner is blind, off-camber, climbing, falling, or bumpy. Many are all of that. Fat cars with big engines are serious work here, because you&amp;#039;re always struggling to keep the rear bumper over the pavement or the front tires from boiling off. Conversely, small, slow cars are also rough, because the rapid elevation changes evaporate momentum whenever you make the tiniest mistake.   You could say the 4371-pound M6 is too fat and understeery for this, its tires too abused, but that&amp;#039;s a cop-out. Grattan turns any car&amp;#039;s strength into a weakness. So you have patience. You think more than you&amp;#039;re used to. And the BMW begins to behave. You hit that uphill divot onto the front straight where the car bottoms out and flings sideways at 80 mph, and you catch it without lifting and think, I am a golden god and this place is amazing and this car deserves a freaking medal.  It should go without saying that getting Grattan even close to right is pretty satisfying. Get it right lap after lap, stalking someone for a pass that you finally pull off, and it&amp;#039;s a high bordering on the religious. Which, when you get down to it, is why we do this stuff in the first place. \u2014Sam Smith   Road Atlanta is a big drive from Ann Arbor, but the M6 is a big, comfortable cruiser. Adaptive shocks keep the 20-inch wheels and low-profile tires from assaulting your backside. The 16-speaker stereo helps turn the stressful interstate into a blood-pressure drop, and the bright head-up display shows your speed without making you take your eyes off the road. The car&amp;#039;s interior begs to be groped, from the pornographically fat steering-wheel rim to the two-tone, French-stitched dashboard. No sunroof? It doesn&amp;#039;t matter, because the black Alcantara headliner, with its gorgeous black-leather stripe down the middle, makes up for it.  At highway speeds in sixth gear, the engine dawdles along silently. And then you reach the track. Road Atlanta is the only place where I overslow for at least half of the corners and never grow the courage to go any faster. You rocket under the bridge and plummet downhill to the fourth-gear, right-hand Turn 12, trying to not stare at the outside wall, which is approaching faster than you can look away. Then, just as you&amp;#039;re feeling better about yourself, you arrive at Turn One\u2014a banked, uphill right that emasculates everyone. It&amp;#039;s almost impossible to overcook, but you&amp;#039;ll spend ages trying to get it right. Ditto the breathtaking, plunging esses, which are followed shortly after by one of the longest straights in North America. The latter serves no purpose other than to lull you into a false sense of security before you head back under the bridge. Drive on the limit here and you feel like a hero. Trouble is, even in a predictable car like this, those laps are rare. That&amp;#039;s what makes Road Atlanta so stressful. And amazing. \u2014Jason Thomas    It sits near rural roads and abandoned house trailers in a part of Ohio that is close to nowhere. Everything you see at Nelson Ledges could be much older than the 60 or so years separating the track&amp;#039;s dirt origins and the repaved present.  There&amp;#039;s a timeless quality to what happens here. The woman who meets people at the front gate is the daughter of the man who helped build the track and who ran it for 42 years. The facilities are modest and sparse. Most of the corners have no curbing. There are spots where the asphalt is so narrow, it&amp;#039;s dangerous to put two cars side-by-side at speed.   In an era where country-club tracks and pro-friendly facilities compete to add private garages and spectator suites, Ledges comes off somewhere between deliberately quaint and unpleasantly primitive. The paddock is mostly unpaved, and there are no elevation changes or Alan Wilson-style compound turns here. Instead, it&amp;#039;s just fast. It&amp;#039;s been fast since it was nothing but dirt, and it&amp;#039;s now fast enough that Formula Atlantics are covering its two miles in under a minute, with the motorcycle-engined sports racers just a few seconds behind.  The M6 is in no danger of cracking the one-minute mark, but a few exploratory laps dip into the 1:17 range, with more to come if we had fresh tires and time to work out the kinks. Or, more specifically, the Kink. This is the track&amp;#039;s gut check. The amount of braking you do before the wavy pavement dips toward Turn 12 is the difference between a trophy, a disappointment, and the tire barrier. The M6 fires out of the Carousel and toward the Kink at 142 mph, the anonymous scenery blurring in the windows. It should be possible to make it through at 130 or above, but I keep pressing the middle pedal and letting the ABS bump-skip the car to 122 before hauling down for the wide hairpin formed by 12 and 13.   I&amp;#039;ve been here in everything from a Lotus 7 clone to a Volkswagen Phaeton, but the Gran Coupe truly impresses with its vicious power delivery and its ability to maintain momentum between Turns Two and Four. Only the long, bumpy Carousel, with the premium it places on high-speed grip, takes the M6 off its game. But then you see the exit past the final flag station, engage hyperspace, and the car redeems itself in spades.  BMW&amp;#039;s reputation in this country was built at tracks like this one, showing the substance behind the &amp;quot;ultimate driving machine&amp;quot; tag line. Around this big, fast track, this big, fast Bimmer feels right at home. \u2014Jack Baruth   There are two things you really need to know about Putnam Park. The first is that the approach to Turn One is downhill. People tend to forget that and brake too late. Those people also tend to exit the track before they reach Turn Two. No matter\u2014there are acres of grassy runoff.   The second thing you need to know is that you treat Turn 10 with respect. Every time, no exceptions. You can cheerfully and callously drift your way through Nine, but once the entrance to Putnam&amp;#039;s final corner appears, it&amp;#039;s time to pay attention. There&amp;#039;s a pretty big wall there, and you don&amp;#039;t want to meet it.  The wall in 10 aside, there&amp;#039;s not much to hit at Putnam, which makes it tempting to take chances in a car as big and as fast as the M6. Of course it burns down the front straight, smoking past start/finish, but it&amp;#039;s the strength and dependable feedback from the big carbon-ceramic brakes that allow that extra bit of speed.   The run to Eight is quick, but the M6 isn&amp;#039;t particularly happy along the off-camber, constant-radius big corner. If someone else is paying your tire bill, you can straighten the car on exit with your right foot. There&amp;#039;s always plenty of torque available to put the BMW sideways.  Putnam&amp;#039;s fast, flowing sections and long front straight are good matches for the M6&amp;#039;s virtues. Few cars barrel along a place like this at this kind of pace. Some people will deactivate all the electronic nannies just to see how quickly the V-8 can turn the wide back tires into dust around Seven and Eight. That&amp;#039;s fine. As long as you respect that final corner, Putnam offers a full plate of thrills. With only a crumb of risk. \u2014James Watson    Heading down the back straight, the speedometer blows past a buck fifty about where ALMS driver Joey Hand once flipped a BMW end-over-end. I doubt he was going much faster.  Mid-Ohio is my favorite track in America because it&amp;#039;s simultaneously Big League and completely accessible. It feels enormous, and at first glance, there are a million things to hit. Then you realize the track is designed in a way that, if you&amp;#039;re half-conscious, you won&amp;#039;t hit anything at all.   If you manage to haul the M6 down from autobahn speed in time for the 100-degree right at the end of the straight, the reward is Madness, a left-handed roller coaster that drops you three stories in three seconds, from apex to track-out. Madness leads into the tunnel-like Thunder Valley (maybe it&amp;#039;s better than the one in Elkhart Lake, maybe not), which is punctuated by Turn 12, an uphill left that drops and goes off-camber just as you think you have it right. Oversteer always ensues.  The track&amp;#039;s second half begins with a dinky, thousand-foot front straight. You then duck under a bridge, through a chicane, and onward toward the Keyhole, a constant-radius exercise in patience that tightens, levels off, and loses camber right as you start to feel like like a pro. (Notice a pattern?) So much for maximizing entry speed onto that back straight.   The Gran Coupe revels in Mid-Ohio&amp;#039;s technical sections. It has a wider track and much better rear-wheel traction than the M5, so you need to be patient with the understeer. Or you can work with the boost and feather in just enough throttle to turn the car something like neutral, dancing back and forth between grip and slip. The icing on the cake comes when you&amp;#039;re back in the paddock. Bros in their 900-hp Nissan GT-Rs ask what&amp;#039;s been done to your car, because they couldn&amp;#039;t pull away on the straights. Dudes in 911 Turbos want to know which aftermarket exhaust you have, because they could hear the BMW over their own engines. The shy ones wait until you walk away to look at your tires, because they couldn&amp;#039;t hang through the corners.  Let them have their stripped-out race cars and smoke-spewing tuner nightmares; your bone-stock luxury sedan can take them all to lunch. On the way home, you fire up the LED headlights, dump the V-8 into sixth, and slither down the highway at less than half of the speed that you just reached on one of the best tracks in the world. This is how to live. What a car. What a part of the country. What a week. \u2014Jason Cammisa   Test Results- Acceleration: 1 Foot: (rollout) 0.3 sec 60 Feet: 1.9 sec Rolling start:,5\u201360 MPH 4.8 sec Quarter- Mile: 12.1 SECONDS @ 120 MPH 0\u201310 MPH 0.3 0\u201320 1.0 0\u201330 1.6 0\u201340 2.1 0\u201350 3.1  0-60 - 3.9 SECONDS 0\u201370 4.7 0\u201380 6.2 0\u201390 7.4 0\u2013100 8.6 0\u2013110 10.0 0\u2013120 12.1 0\u2013130 13.9 0\u2013140 16.1 0\u2013150 18.5  Top Speed (elec limited, mfr est): 155 MPH Braking 60\u20130 MPH: 118 ft 80\u20130 MPH: 209 ft Fade: none Handling Roadholding: 0.95 g (300-ft skidpad) Balance: mild understeer Interior Noise: Idle: 45 decibels 70-mph crusing: 68 decibels 0\u201370 mph, Peak: 82 decibels    Specifications    PRICE    STEERING     Base $113,995 Assist hydraulic   as Tested $141,775 Ratio 13.1:1       Turns, Lock-to-Lock 2.6   ENGINE    Turning Circle 41.0 ft   layout front, longitudinal       configuration 90-degree V-8 SUSPENSION     Induction twin-turbocharged Front upper and lower A-arms, anti-roll bar   Material aluminum block and heads Rear multilink, anti-roll bar   Valvetrain DOHC, 32 valves       Displacement 4395 cc BRAKES AND TIRES     Bore x Stroke 89.0 x 88.3 mm brakes, Front 16.1-in carbon-ceramic vented rotors,   Compression Ratio 10.0:1   6-piston fixed calipers   Redline 7200 rpm brakes, Rear 15.6-in carbon-ceramic vented rotors,   Fuel delivery direct injection   1-piston fixed calipers       Tires Michelin Pilot Super Sport       size, front 265/35ZR-20       size, rear 295/30ZR-20       BODY AND CHASSIS         construction unit; steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber       Length 197.2 in       Width 74.8 in       Height 54.8 in       Wheelbase 116.7 in       Track, front/rear 64.2/63.5 in       doors/seats 5-Apr       EPA Class compact       Cargo Capacity 16 ft3       drag coefficient x frontal area 0.33 x 25.6 ft2   TRANSMISSION          driven wheels rear WEIGHT      transmission Type 6-speed manual Curb Weight 4371 lb   Final-Drive Ratio 3.15:1, limited-slip differential distribution front/rear 52/48%   Gear Ratio Max Speed (RPM) Weight-to-Power ratio 7.8 lb/hp   1 4.06:1 45 mph (7200)       2 2.40:1 77 mph (7200) fuel      3 1.58:1 116 mph (7200) EPA City/hwy 15/22 mpg   4 1.19:1 154 mph (7200) Capacity 21.1 gallons   5 1.00:1 155 mph (6100) range 464 miles   6 0.87:1 155 mph (5300) recommended fuel grade premium gasoline             Test Notes \u00B7 Steering feel is better than most modern BMWs\u2014hydraulically assisted, linear, and feels real. Wish this were the rule, not the exception. \u00B7 A complete sweetheart to put sideways, thanks to the long wheelbase and big power. \u00B7 Good God, it&amp;#039;s heavy. So heavy. You notice it everywhere on the track, but it&amp;#039;s pretty well masked on the street. Test Conditions: Temperature: 73\u00B0F | Relative Humidity: 62% | Elevation:930 ft | Wind: calm | Location: Chelsea, Michigan Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course   Length:: 2.3 (miles)  Turns:: 13  In a word:: Boss.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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