As car guys, we are all critics. It's in our blood to check out every other car on the road and judge it to some degree. The good ones may get labeled as "clean" or even "badass." But you can't casually declare, "That's the ultimate street car!" First off, the title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and, secondly, there is protocol that must be followed. Every aspect of each competitor's dream car must be analyzed and quantified. So let's start crunching some numbers.
Okay, stop counting, there are only nine cars in this photo and one of them wasn't even in last month's teaser issue. As it turned out, our meet and greet arrival day eliminated two competitors before the show even started. Ten cars times 15 tests divided by two days equals no time to wait for stragglers. And, with one hour to go before the 6PM lockdown, we only had three cars checked in at K&N Engineering's Riverside, Calif. headquarters. The unprepared were stressing out in rush hour traffic, calling us with pleas of mercy from their cell phones. Meanwhile the teams on hand were staring at their watches and grinning.
Every year the competitors take the USCC more seriously and, to be fair to them, we had to stick to our guns. The white STI called just after 5 o'clock. His team had fallen behind on some last minute tuning and they could not make the deadline. A few minutes later, we were notified that the black NSX's fuel pump had failed on the freeway. We instantly put in a call to Tuning Technologies, who are located nearby in Colton, Calif. Tom Ashley the Assistant Principal at Heritage High School was grading papers when he got the call at 5:15PM. He was about an hour away, but his Evo VIII was in the faculty parking lot, topped off with 100 octane.
As the clock ticked down, exhausted drivers in amazing machinery blasted through the gate. Each took a deep breath of post-traumatic relief as they realized they were in. But, none were more elated than Ashley. We could hear the Evo's exhaust screaming at T-minus 30 seconds. At 6:00PM the gate was locked. We had nine competitors, but only one would be crowned the 2008 Ultimate Street Car Challenge champion.-Andy Hope
How We Score
While the competitors have changed over the years, our scoring system for the USCC hasn't. There are 15 tests all together and 14 are worth 110 points for the top scoring contender. One hundred points are awarded for full marks and another ten freebie points are given just for finishing. The only exception is the 25 raw points for the Gross Display of Horsepower competition.
With all that said, most people, including the competitors, still have no idea how the USCC scoring system works, even though we've explained it each time. So this time, we'll break down the scoring with the base price competition. There's even a graph for the algebraically challenged.
We start with each car's base price. In this case, since the cheapest car is the most favorable, it gets 100 points. This puts the Subaru Impreza at point A with its $15,595 price tag immediately in the lead. The new GT-R, on the other hand, is the most expensive at $71,900 and thus the poorest performer in this test. It gets zero points. We mark that as point B. Draw a line between A and B and now we have the scoring slope for this competition. Each competitor is then scored according to this slope. Competitions where more is better have a positive slope.
For example, the Mitsubishi Evo VIII costs $28,987. If you draw a line up from the bottom price axis to where it crosses the scoring slope we just established (dotted grey line), and then draw another line across to the points axis, you have the points the Evo VIII scored for this competition. The last step is to add the ten participation points, which effectively just moves the entire scoring slope up by 10 points.
The slope of each competition is the critical part. A relatively steep slope will have a wide points spread, helping the top winner gain a sizeable advantage in points for a very minimal margin of winning. A shallow slope works the other way around. You can't predict how other cars will do in emissions or lap times, but in obvious competitions like horsepower and ride quality, where the slope is most likely very steep, a difference of one or two points in judging might have a huge impact on how many points a contender earns. Each year the slope gets steeper and steeper, per the competition.-Jay Chen