personally i always look at 0-100 and 1/4 mile times to judge cars against each other, because the clock doesnt lie, but this also includes power to weight ratio and drivetrain efficieny, co-efficient of drag, blah, blah, blah

only downfall, its bloody difficult to measure handling with a stopwatch without other variables clouding results

when i look at motors i will first look at hp i admit but if i decide to reaserch something genuinlly (you know what i mean) its the times i look at, most cars also have braking times included in specs these days too which is good

ddzagonals talk reminded me of somewhere i heard that with high budget race cars for qualifying they wind the turbos up to some rediculous figure like 35 or 40 psi and as soon as qualifyings over they just toss the turbos out, but for racing a more reliable figure like 15-20psi is used, just thought that was interesting