NEARLY HITTING Red Line; New Sky makes a good performer almost great.(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

There are competitors to the Saturn Sky Red Line that could probably lap your favorite racetrack faster. The Honda S2000, Mazda MX-5 (Miata) and BMW Z4 could probably all get around your garden-variety handling course just a bit quicker. That's okay. The tradeoff with the Sky Red Line is that it would still be within a few ticks of the competition's lap times while being several ticks ahead in ride comfort (not to mention style). After your 24 hours of whatever, your competitors would be perhaps beaten and sleepy while you could spring from the cockpit, if not the podium, ready to disco (if you're really serious about racing this Red Line, do it at Mid-Ohio, where a lot of the suspension tuning took place).

In fact, had Saturn added some more storage pockets in the cockpit, you could unreservedly recommend the Sky Red Line to most moderate performance-minded buyers in the segment, all but the hard-core stopwatch clickers.

We drove a few Sky Red Lines through the canyon roads outside Santa Barbara, California, specifically Foxen Canyon Road, Ballard Canyon Road and Old Coast Highway, where it separates from Highway 101 just uphill from the ocean. All these roads are finely twisted around hilly contours their whole length. None are what you would call billiard-table smooth. Most have miles of filled-in potholes that any challenger could cite in the next municipal election. The Sky Red Line just floated over them, as it floated over everything else on smooth sections of Highway 101.

The ride isolation is surprisingly pleasant without being numb. A unique torque beam connects the transmission, driveshaft and differential to eliminate two mounting points to the frame that were causing too much NVH in early prototypes.

The standard vehicle stability control system has three settings depending on your mood. A limited-slip differential is also standard, a must-have for a serious sports car.

"At first we were looking at electronic stability control and the limited-slip differential as options, then we said, `Wait, let's just do it right from the start,''' said program manager Darren Post, who rides sport bikes when he is not tuning Saturns. "I think it's a lot more than a consumer would expect for this kind of car.''