Depending on who you ask, the first performance model car was probably a 28-horsepower Cannstatt-Daimler roadster built all the way back in 1899. We can split hairs all day and haggle about the definition of “sports car,” but the existence of the Cannstatt-Daimler roadster at least proves that we’ve been trying to make cars go faster for about as long as we’ve been making cars. If an automaker is leaving a car’s potential untapped, you can count on tuners, hot-rodders, and mad scientists in garages across the country to try and squeeze every last horse out of the latest Mustang, Corvette, or Challenger.
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