Third Annual Modified Tuner Shootout

This year’s third annual Modified Tuner Shootout—an event that has quickly become one of the most highly anticipated and hard-fought competitions in the industry—was once again sponsored by Continental Tire and supported by NASA Arizona and UMS Tuning. The locations and format of the event remained unchanged, with the dyno competition taking place at UMS Tuning in Mesa, Arizona, on the company’s state-of-the-art DynaPack system and the autocross, drag and time attack events taking place at Firebird International Raceway in Chandler, Arizona, as part of NASA Arizona’s biggest race weekend of the season.

Of course, this event is nothing without some of the country’s top tuners competing for the overall and class victories, and this year’s field was our strongest ever. GST Motorsports returned to defend its overall and AWD class titles, Hasport (last year’s FWD class winner) joined forces with Tage Evanson and his K24-powered EG Civic (last year’s FWD runner-up) and RWD champ ScienceofSpeed returned as well, this time with an immaculately prepared Acura NSX. Perennial front-runners Crawford Performance and Factor X Motorsports Development were also back, and with first-timers Forged Performance and its R35 GT-R, Ksport and its turbocharged DC5 Integra Type-R, AFI Performance and its turbocharged S2000, Sportcar Motion and its all-motor EG Civic, and YimiSport/Full-Race and its GRB Impreza STI, it was anybody’s guess who might come out on top.

We also threw two wild cards into the mix, making this year’s Shootout more unique than ever. For starters, we had none other than D1GP driver Forrest Wang competing in his S13 Nissan 240SX drift car (with trackside support from sponsor Full-Race). And as a way of demonstrating just how good the Continental ContiSportContact 3 ultra-high-performance summer tire really is, we had Tony Szirka from UMS Tuning competing unofficially with his awesome Mitsubishi EVO IX on a fresh set of 265/35ZR18s. To be honest, we had some reservations about pitting Tony’s EVO on street tires against this group of track-prepped beasts on race rubber, but as you’ll find out the UMS EVO/Conti tire combo was downright amazing.

Just like last year, the winner of each of the three timed events was awarded 100 points and all the other teams were scored as a percentage of the winning time (example: if the fastest autocross time was 42.024 seconds, a car posting a best time of 47.899 seconds would score 87.736 points since 42.024/47.899 x 100 = 87.736). We favor this system of scoring because it captures the actual performance gap between all the competitors in each event. However, we’ve once again limited the dyno competition to 25 points for the winner because engine performance is already well-tested in the drag and time attack events and we do not want to overemphasize the importance of horsepower.

Without further delay, we hope you enjoy this year’s Modified Tuner Shootout as much as we enjoyed putting it together and watching all the action go down!

Dyno Tony, Jeremy and the crew from UMS Tuning are special. No, not Jerry Lewis telethon special, but special nonetheless given their willingness to once again host the Shootout’s dyno competition. It’s a pretty grueling task to dyno test 12 different cars in one day, but somehow the UMS boys pulled it off in record time. Thanks, guys! In some ways this is actually the best day of the Shootout, not only because UMS is such a gracious host, but because we get to spend quite a bit of time hanging out with the teams and going over their cars, picking up all kinds of clever go-fast secrets along the way.

By David Pratte

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