These are dedicated race cars. They have window nets, stiff suspension, and kill switches. And they're driven by people who couldn't tell you the difference between a supercharger and a toaster.
Toyota's 30th year of hosting the Pro/Celebrity Race at Long Beach will once again begin with 15 knuckleheads grinding gears and swapping paint with five pro drivers through the city's streets. It's a way for Toyota to draw more spectators to an event otherwise dominated by gearheads and alcoholics. And the truth is, the Pro/Celebrity race is almost always fun to watch, whether you're a celeb hater like myself or you feel like you know Brad Pitt well enough to be his sister.
It's a great time for a few reasons. One, the amateurs race with the pros, which usually means asses are getting kicked all morning long. Two, the cars are actually pretty cool.
For 2006, the venerable Celica has finally been retired and replaced by the only remotely sporty Toyota without a truck bed-the Scion tC. Not just any Scion tC, mind you. Progress Auto in Anaheim, Calif., has been tinkering with the suspension for the better part of four months prior to the cars' release, and, in a few words, they done good. Only traveling through bumpy corner 3 at the Streets did the little Scion feel slightly underdamped. Most importantly, the stock car has a natural tendency to understeer, which has been preserved in the tuning, something important when you've paid for twenty $20,000 cars to be driven by celebrities in unison through the concrete luge course that Long Beach becomes on April 7 - 9th this year.
Toyota estimates horsepower to be about 175 (15 over stock), thanks to a prototype TRD race header, TRD intake, and stainless steel exhaust. The low end torque of the Scion is a marked improvement over the Celica of a year ago-power is much more useable through tight corners. Like any tC, there's no point in sending the tach needle flying to redline, as it seems to stop making beneficial power at anything above 5k.
Heel/toe downshifting would be easier with a gas pedal placement slightly higher up, but we don't anticipate that will be a factor to someone who learned to drive stick shift about a week before the race.
For all the work the Scions receive though, it's debatable that even more tuning time goes into the drivers, who endure a 4-day long driver training course, courtesy of Danny McKeever's "Fast Lane" driving school at Willow Springs. Instructors report that some celebrities start slow and end up becoming the fastest people behind the wheel, while others who started with high expectations end up dropping out before the checkered flag goes down.
Toyota has quite the lineup this year, entrants including Dave Mirra, William Shatner, and John Elway. You can certainly expect to see us there, if for no other reason than to see Mirra shunt Shatner into a wall before the race is half over.
The amateurs race along with the pros, which usually means asses are getting kicked all morning long.