This thing isn't getting any easier to win.
In truth, every car in the Ultimate Street Car Challenge is an ultimate street car. The kind of engineering and effort it takes to just make it past the selection process and into the elite group of ten is staggering. Each of the chosen few are pounding down the kind of performance numbers that should cause head scratching in Stuttgart and make chalkboard erasers swing over in Maranello.
The competition has become so demanding that 2006 has only yielded one truly independent entry. A disappointing fact that can be attributed to the funding required to compete with the best of the best. As it has for years, Day One took place at K&N Filters in Riverside, California, where we put a microscope to every conceivable aspect of street car performance. Day Two was at the dragstrip of Los Angeles County Raceway and on the track at the Streets at Willow in Rosamond, California.
The cars were put on a lift to display their engineering strengths and then went bombing over train tracks to test their compliance. The competitors sweated it out on the dyno, and idled with crossed fingers during emissions testing. Each was examined by three of the most experienced car show judges in the country, and all had gas tanks taped shut for perhaps the hardest test of all-fuel economy.
To win just one category in this most competitive USCC ever is an astounding feat. It's a battle of champions, in which even the back markers are in a group of the ten fiercest warriors on North American roads. As you'll soon see, that battle was more demanding and more grueling than ever.
-James Tate
How We Score It
After much contemplation, we decided to keep this year's USCC scoring and tests much the same as before. Each of the 15 tests are on a 110-point scale, with the exception of the final test-Gross Display of Horsepower-which is worth 25 points. We normalized the results of each event on a 100-point scale based on the best and worst performers. The best performance was rewarded with 100 points and the worst zero. Everything in between was given a score in proportion to its performance relative to the best and the worst in that event. We also gave 10 points to each contender just for finishing the event, which, added to a 100-point top score, gives us the 110-point scale. That encourages each entrant to at least enter the event and cross the finish line (in some cases) to get 10 freebie points.
If, for example, the most powerful car made 800hp and the least powerful car made 300hp, there would be a 500hp spread between them. A car making 700hp would be 80 percent of the way from the loser to the winner, so it would get 90 points (that's 80 points, plus 10 points for not blowing up). Some tests are objective, some subjective, but all were scored and normalized based on this method. Only the Gross Display of Horsepower was judged without the 10 participation points or normalization. A perfect score would be 1,565 points. Like last year, this year's winner only earned 75 percent of that.
-Jay Chen