Third Annual Modified Tuner Shootout

In conditions better suited to Shamu the killer whale, we expected the RWD cars to really suffer in comparison to the FWD and AWD teams, but somehow local hot shoe Brady Dohrmann found a way to get the SoS NSX around the autocross course in just 46.846 seconds, good for third overall and first in the RWD group. The tail-happy nature of the NSX might have helped the car rotate enough through the tight, wet cone course. Clearly, Brady can drive and Chris from SoS knows how to set up his car for the wet. With AWD, traction control and full-tread-depth Toyo R888s, the Forged Performance GT-R was exactly one-one-hundredth of a second slower than the SoS NSX, a solid performance putting them fourth overall and second in the AWD group, but you could tell driver Will Taylor and team owner Sharif Abdelbaset were both a little disappointed. And just one-tenth of a second behind the Forged GT-R was Tim Kuo in the Sportcar Motion EG Civic with a time of 46.982 seconds. Tim may be going to medical school in the fall, but the man known online as Stinky Tofu did a hell of a job peddling the all-motor Civic to a top-five finish.

Billy Johnson has a habit of winning races in the Grand Am KONI Challenge series in everything from Hondas to Porsches, but controlling FXMD’s fire-breathing NSX around a wet autocross course is an entirely different ball game. In second gear the big turbo wasn’t spooling up at all, so Billy had to leave it in first gear the whole way around, bumping the rev limiter repeatedly at certain spots on the course. But despite this problem, Billy managed to throw down a 47.362-second lap, good for a very respectable sixth overall and second in the RWD group. Just three-tenths of a second behind in seventh place was National Autocross champion Brian Peters in the Ksport DC5 Type-R, where he made good use of its Ksport GT Pro dampers and 2,300-lb chassis despite running on Hoosier slicks.

The only other car in the 47-second range was Tony Szirka in his Conti street-tire-equipped UMS Tuning EVO 8, posting a best time of 47.876 seconds. The remaining teams all struggled mightily to find any grip out on the soaked tarmac. The best nationally ranked autocrosser Jeremy Renshaw could do in the traction-limited AFI Turbo S2000 was a 48.608, four-tenths of a second slower than Bondurant Racing School instructor and Modified Mag Driver Training columnist Mike Speck was able to post with a 48.248 in the BFG R1 slicks-equipped YimiSport Impreza STI. Forrest Wang in his drift-spec S13 couldn’t find any grip at all on his first run, so he bailed in search of street tires but wasn’t able to make it back in time to post a faster time.

Quarter-Mile
Ever wonder why a standing-start, quarter-mile contest of speed is called a “drag race”? I rarely see cross-dressers at the track (always look for an Adam’s apple!), so I’m going to assume it has something to do with the slang term “drag,” meaning street or main road. These are the things that go through your head as you wait for the rain to stop, and as luck would have it the rain did stop just in time for the NASA crew and Firebird officials to open the dragstrip for us, but we only had about 15 minutes to complete the event before they’d need to convert it over for use as the front straightaway on the 1.6-mile Full Course used for Road Racing, HPDE and time attack.