Modified Tuner Shootout - Final Results

Phoenix had seen record rainfall and flooding prior to the Shootout weekend, but unlike last year, Mother Nature blessed us with nothing but sunny skies this time around. This meant that there would be no excuses and no easy points to be scored. But that didn't mean a parking lot full of pylons wouldn't shuffle the deck.

Having taken a big lead after the dyno competition, Chris Rado was sitting pretty but found piloting his widebody Scion through the tight and tricky autocross course rather challenging. Going off-course on both of his practice runs and his first (of three) timed runs really put the pressure on, and with gearing and turbo sizing designed more for big road courses than for autocrossing, it was something of a miracle that Rado posted a competitive time of 50.813 seconds. This put the World Racing tC in seventh place, with Jim Cozzolino in his NSX struggling just as badly to find his way through the maze of orange pylons in eighth place with a best time of 52.939 seconds.

Driver Gary Sheehan must wake up in a cold sweat whenever he has autocross nightmares. That's because for the second time in Shootout history, Sheehan posted what appeared to be the fastest time around our autocross course in the GST Impreza, only to have it snatched away by a raised marshal flag. Two years ago it was a nudged pylon that robbed him of the event win and this year it was a missed gate that DNF'd his fastest run. As a result, the GST team could do no better than 44.929 seconds, placing them third in the autocross ranking.

Just two-tenths of a second quicker than GST was Jeremy Renshaw in the AFI Turbo S2000. Jeremy is a nationally competitive autocrosser, so it should come as no surprise that his skill around the cones allowed AFI to jump into the number two spot and pull a 4-point gap on friendly rival AQ Motorsports.

But once again, for the third Shootout in a row, it was Tage Evanson in his trusty EG Civic who took the autocross win with a best time of 43.991 seconds. This earned Tage 100 points and helped him make up some of the ground he lost on the dyno.

Unfortunately Sportcar Motion didn't fare quite as well, despite having a lightweight Type-R with a very responsive engine that should've been perfectly suited to autocross. Driver Renzo Marsano had never autocrossed before, and as any experienced cone-dodger will tell you, this motorsport is all about the driver. Renzo's inexperience meant the best the SCM ITR could do was sixth with a best time of 49.785 seconds.

Most people probably don't think of autocross as a discipline that's hard on equipment, but for the third year in a row we had a car suffer a major mechanical failure. During his first practice run, Tony Szirka in his UMS Tuning EVO VIII had the rear differential explode when launching the car aggressively across the start line. But in typical UMS fashion, these guys had smiles on their faces as they swapped a fresh diff off of a customer's car and onto theirs before the drag event. Gotta love it.