Sport Compact Car Project Cars Battle

Project WRX STI"This shit's in the bag."

I knew with certainty the STi would crush all other project car panty-waists: it generates .97g on the skidpad and rages through our slalom at 72.2 mph with stock tires. Plus, our car-an '04 model-ran a 13.1-second quarter mile stock.

For this battle, we mounted even stickier Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires, perhaps the best all-around R-compound rubber for street use, on a set of lightweight, bronze Rota Boost wheels. HKS coil-overs and a world of roll stiffness, thanks to Hotchkis anti-roll bars, delivered the STi a PhD in rotation, on the throttle, off the throttle and everywhere in between.

"Oh, it's raining? No problemo." As I pull onto the track, I feel sorry for the fools without huge grip, huge power, three limited slips, all-wheel drive and fresh, water-friendly, R-compound Michelins.

Turn One at the Streets of Willow is its fastest corner, taken in some cars in fourth gear. I swing wide into the hot pit entrance to the left to open up the approach, and turn toward the rain-soaked apex going about 75 mph (this is still a warm-up lap, after all).

Hmm, I notice, the car is still pointed straight, so I rotate the steering wheel a few more degrees. Nope, still going straight. And now the insipid understeer is an immediate and uncontrollable four-wheel slide off the edge of the track.

Two wheels off, gather it up, and redirect toward Turn Two. On the brakes, down to second, turn in. Nope, as Bush Sr. says, "not gonna do it." I see the rocks looming off the other end of Turn Two, yank the STi's emergency brake, rotate the car, and slowly accelerate through the turn. What the hell?

Turn Three, the horseshoe, is coming hard, and the ABS fires as I slow for the corner entry, dial in steering and roll into turbocharged torque. More understeer! Fantastic. No, wait one ten-thousandth of a second, snap oversteer! Isn't this super?

The rest of the laps go like this: Slow down more than I should have to, trail the brakes to encourage a little rotation (fat chance), get the car partially turned, stand on the go-pedal and catch slide after slide after slide, cause that's the only way she's going to turn quick enough to make decent lap times.

It was not nearly as fun as it sounds. Project STi in the rain, in fact, nears the top of the list for the most ill-handling vehicles I've ever driven. This includes an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham, a Fiat Cinquecento and various lawn tractors.

What happened to the all-weather, World Rally Championship-winning Subaru? Well, like Hammond Albert says, it never rains in California, and the STi is tuned accordingly. All that roll stiffness pays big dividends in the dry, but in the wet prevents even superlative tires from working, making them judder in a hellish, understeering jitterbug, and squashes any attempt at wet turn-in. Hey, at least the new Rotas fixed the torque steer.

I somehow managed to wrestle this pile of graceless fury to a respectable finish. In the dry, however, I maintain the STi will crush all comers. - Jared Holstein

Project SRT-4After explaining to the throttle-hungry masses in this morning's driver's meeting the consequences of driving SCC's project cars off the track, I knew I had cursed myself with a day of foot-swallowing embarrassment. And if you're driving with a curse that's going to make you eat a foot, you sure as hell shouldn't be driving Project SRT-4.

This car is a beast. Blessed with a legacy of musclecar brethren that produces enough torque to spin the tires on God's own chariot, Project SRT-4 is a modern rip-snortin' alternative to good ol' pushrod power. And with a few critical exceptions, it drives just like one of those cars of yesteryear.

Plant foot to firewall in Project SRT-4 and you're rewarded with a 270 lb-ft brick to the kidneys. Exercise a few neurons toward the steering wheel and it snaps hard in the direction you suggest. Breathe on the hair-trigger brake pedal and you're hammering to a StopTech-motivated halt harder than any Neon in recorded history. Project SRT-4 is an exercise in right-now reflexes, overpowered front tires and 1970 AAR 'Cuda attitude. Don't piss it off.

I'll do my best.

Belt on. Helmet on. Boost dial on 2. Water sprayer-no wait, won't be needing that in this deluge. Any other day I would have used that on the way to the track before fueling Project SRT-4 with 100-octane race gas to eke the last bit of power from its 2.4 boosted liters.

You see, Mopar's stage 2 kit comes with a driver-selectable ECU calibration and intercooler mister for track excursions. Put in the expensive fuel, flip the switches, and shave a half second from your quarter-mile time. Today, I ignore the sprayer and turn the boost down with every passing lap.

Rain is falling like dinosaur piss and there's so much standing water on the track that an Evinrude E-TEC 250 outboard would make the car faster than all the power in the world. Surprisingly, Project SRT-4 isn't a complete pig, thanks to its Quaife limited slip and BFGoodrich g-Force KDW tires. Still, like paddling the Titanic with a matchstick, the futility of this contest becomes clear after the first few laps. We might as well be swamp racing Top Fuel dragsters.

By lap three, I'm starting to find rhythm in the pitch, catch and mash routine with the steering and throttle. By lap four, I'm having fun and by lap five, well, I eat my foot.

Hammering up the front straight, I tempt the wheel into Turn One with a slight throttle lift and begin a slow, painful and unrecoverable spin into the gravel. I can hear the peanut gallery explode in gratifying "I told you so" laughter from almost a half mile away. This sucks.

Still, somewhere in the tornado of off-throttle rotation before the spin, this little beast showed some truly endearing character. Once you learn to live with its near-instant rotation, massive wheelspin and utterly silly brake feel, it can be, well, fun. - Josh Jacquot.

Project SilviaThis is the car that should have been. In Japan, the S13 Silvia is one of the most popular tuner cars ever built. Its turbocharged SR20DET engine has huge aftermarket support and is still popular years after it slipped out of production.

Unfortunately, some clueless desk jockey in Nissan's product planning department decided the United States would prefer an emasculated version of this great machine and turned the Silvia into the cute secretary hauler otherwise known as the 240SX. It became known as the sports car that almost could.

Fortunately, Project Silvia can.

Despite geek-boy Coleman's best efforts to make it look like an exercise in stealth technology, there's no denying Project Silvia's capability on a race track. Coleman is the guy who, for better or worse, started the air-superiority paint scheme craze, and today Project Silvia sports a fresh coat of Krylon's finest. I've always thought the matte finish get-up looks better on pottery than on cars, but that's just me. Coleman cares little about how things look, and his cars always haul ass, so this should be fun even if it is ugly.

On the track, this is the most fun car here. The Garrett turbo meters out smooth power over a wide, seamless powerband. But during my drive, it doesn't feel like it's making the full 290 hp it's capable of. I don't find out until after the drive that the boost controller was "accidentally" turned off, limiting boost to 11 psi.

Even so, Project Silvia's JIC coil-overs are to die for; you can steer with the throttle like the drift king, Keiichi Tsuchiya, or you can drive grip-style like, uh, me. The Quaife differential is smooth and allows precise off-throttle turn in. Even in the rain, Project Silvia is a lean, mean, dialed machine. But it's not perfect.

Two annoying oddities keep it from scoring a perfect 10. Hit the middle pedal hard and it shudders like an Abrams tank coming to a halt. Of course, this is only a problem if you're afraid of driving an Abrams tank-or if you really want to stop.

Even more fun is trying to modulate Brembos that probably could stop an Abrams tank. With too much front brake bias and aggressive pads, keeping the tires from locking in the wet is a contest between going slow and going off track. I tried the latter once, which filled the wheels with mud and sprayed the flanks of Coleman's sweetheart with gravel. Sorry, Dave, I'll buy you a can of Krylon.- Mike Kojima

Project EVO VIII MRWhy bother including a stock project car in a shootout comparing cars with piles of aftermarket enhancements, you ask? There's a one-word answer: benchmark.

It's with that mantra in my head that I realize what's happening with every passing lap during the EVO's track session: it's winning. This is not only the best-suited car for these conditions, but it's also the least compromised. Bone stock, the EVO is so easy to drive fast in the wet that it actually has a switch on the dash for it. And so it goes...

Click the Active Center Differential into gravel mode, which is also meant for wet tarmac, and experience the sweetest combination of balanced handling, power and communication that's ever been put on four wheels. That mode might as well be called "kick ass on all SCC project cars," because that's exactly what it does.

I'm now a convert to the ways of the Active Center Differential. Even without Active Yaw Control, which splits torque between the car's rear wheels (and is available on EVOs in Europe and Japan), ACD works its magic with striking influence, especially in the wet.

There's never a stumble in this car. No fear of driving off the track. No fear of overshooting a braking zone. Nothing. It's like driving with Tommi Mkinen running the controls. But there are two ways to look at it. The glass-half-full approach says this car is smoking fast, easy to drive and will make anyone a hero in the wet. Done. Sold. Stick a fork in it. Right? Maybe.

The other, less pure approach sees it differently. Sure, the EVO is all that. But it's also a big-dollar solution for the less resourceful enthusiast. Anyone can be fast in one of these cars. Anyone can be Tommi Mkinen. It's stock, and on some level it lacks the soul embodied by so many cars in our fleet. Hard-core geeks might even say it's boring. I'm on the fence.

Fast, easy speed in all conditions has undeniable appeal. But being the most expensive car makes it unrealistic in so many ways. Finding a way to go fast without exercising the wallet so much has equal appeal. You decide. - Josh Jacquot

The ResultThe dim, dark, ugly reality of racing project cars against each other is that someone, or rather some car, has to finish last.

And to finish at all, one first must start. Project 300ZX TT did neither. It spent the day bathed in the dry, warm shelter of the pit garage, escaping only to make the occasional camera appearance before returning to the garage for another diaper wipe.

In the unforgettable words of Kojima this car is "Uhhhh, way too valuable to risk in the rain," or "it's a concourse-winning machine with priceless historic value." Or "it's probably the nicest Z32 in the country." Sure, Mike. All we know is it's a car. And it doesn't get driven in the rain. And that's laughable.

In 10th place, surprisingly, is Project 350Z. A victim of its own aggressive setup with wide tires and massive roll stiffness, it proved to be a mess beyond what any of us predicted in these conditions. Unable to put power down or corner with authority, it proves exactly how compromised a 1.0g-car can be if you take away its primary weapon: grip.

Amusingly, Project Rally Beater, Coleman's tree-crushing Datsun 510, isn't last. We're sure it would have been slower than the 350Z had its laps not included so much intentional course cutting. Coleman claims he couldn't keep it out of the dirt. Either way, it's still ahead of Project 300ZX.

Project TSX, with all its luxurious amenities and family car compromises, finds itself about where we expect any 3,230-pound four-door Honda to end up-eighth place. It proved a respectable drive, but without the power or, frankly, the poise of many of our other project cars, it's relegated to a back-of-the-pack finish.

It's hardly a surprise to find a heavy two-wheel-drive sedan at the back of the pack, but finding a nimble, responsive and far-from-underpowered Miata only one rung up the ladder amazed everyone. Sure, Project Miata wasn't exactly prepared for this contest. But it is a Miata. And it is turbocharged. Perhaps the curse of Jacquot still lives in its soul.

How funny is it, then, to find a mildly modified Scion tC in sixth place? This freshman in the fleet finds itself among proven metal in the rankings. Sure, the rain certainly played in its favor by reducing the power advantage of every car here. Meanwhile, the little tC put every last horsepower to the ground, rotated mildly and splashed its way to a result far beyond its pedigree.

Third through fifth spots are covered by a mere .22 seconds. And, oddly, the car that at least two staffers regarded as the odds-on favorite to win, the STi, falls drastically short in fourth. Hot on its tail is the champion of the more-for-less philosophy of fast cars, Coleman's Sentra SE-R. The two couldn't have achieved such similar lap times in more different ways-the STi all straight-line motor and efficient power-to-the-ground engagement, the SE-R with pure cornering speed and early throttle application.

Don't count out the massively entertaining SRT-4 in third. The automotive embodiment of piss-and-vinegar slid, spun and muscled its way onto the wettest podium in car test history. Impressive.

Only the big guns are left. And one of them, embarrassingly, is completely stock. The silver medal goes to Project Silvia. And in the absence of the highly anticipated STi, Silvia and 300ZX dogfight, watching the Silvia draw graceful, sideways arcs at every corner was a testament to both its development and the effectiveness of some serious aftermarket hardware. But, in the rain, it just wasn't enough.

So yes, the champion of Battle of the Project Cars version wet-point-o is our virginal EVO MR. And yes, as of this test, it bears no aftermarket enhancement. And yes, in the dry, it would have been destroyed by at least four cars.

It all comes down to what you want: easy, thoughtless, keep-it-simple-stupid speed. Or, at roughly half the cost, a car like Project Silvia, which is more involving than every stock EVO in the world, more adjustable than a Gumby doll, and on any day except this one, faster than any stock EVO.

Next year.