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The great irony of the Mercedes-Benz SL is that, for decades, its name has stood for Sport Lightweight -- two characteristics attributable to not a single SL produced in the last fifty years. If Stuttgart would stop promising "sports car" levels of performance, we'd probably stop expecting Porsche 911 levels of involvement. If the engineers stopped calling the SL "light," we wouldn't criticize it for being nearly as heavy as an S-class sedan.

April in Michigan means opening day for the Detroit Tigers, and the arrival of baseball season means winter is essentially over. No more winter means that the Michelin Pilot Alpin PA3 winter tires are now off of our Four Seasons Nissan Juke. Our Juke came from the factory wearing Goodyear Eagle RS-A tires, but last October we replaced them with Kumho Ecsta 4X performance rubber, which we found to be grippier and less prone to tire squeal than the stock Goodyears. The Michelin winter tires performed well (albeit in a remarkably mild winter), but we're definitely glad to have the Kumhos back on the Juke -- their excellent grip really helps emphasize the small, turbocharged car's fun-to-drive spirit.

Driving the WRX brought me back four years to when the current generation was just making its debut and I was car shopping. Though the WRX was high on my list, I ultimately ended up buying a Mazdaspeed3 instead. Why? Because the kind of fun you have with a WRX is the kind of entertainment found best on unpaved, muddy, and/or snow-covered back roads where you blast past rows of trees, shoot up and down hills like a roller coaster, and go sideways as much as possible; it's the kind of fun where the distinctive note of the turbocharged flat-four rings out through open fields while you do your best impression of an stage-winning rally racer. When I left the office with the keys to the WRX, its dark gray paint was sparkling clean from the car wash; when I arrived home, the yellow light of my garage only helped to show off the more fitting coating I'd added onto the lower half of the WRX: dirt and mud, the product of sheer driving fun.

Is there room in our Four Seasons fleet for two sporty compact crossovers? We're starting to find out as the Kia Sportage duels against the new Mazda CX-5.