The Ultimate Streetcar Challenge - Road Course

That's what tradition says must happen on the USCC road course. This year, the road course competition, perhaps the USCC's most prestigious event, was held on the 1.45-mile track in the infield of the California Speedway.

At this point in the competition, the field was already afraid of Paul Mumford and his Viper. Most had seen the car on the lift the day before and knew the road course was its home field advantage. Some also knew that Mumford was a class winner and had finished second overall in the 2002 Open Track Challenge--a serious test of car and driver on the West Coast's most serious racetracks in his street-driven Viper.

Even with the 100-plus degree heat, Mumford did as expected. Showing little respect for physics, let alone the other contenders, he stomped the Viper around the track in 1:15.67. The next closest competitor, Steve Mitchell in Daniel Suh's Skyline, was 6.29 seconds slower--a margin that equated to 38 points in the final score.

And Mumford posted this time without ever putting a wheel wrong, sliding the car or even looking like he was trying very hard.

The stakes were high for second place points, and both the Skyline and Supra crews were prepping for a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled death match. Jayasinghe eventually took the hood off his Supra in an attempt to make it cool more efficiently. The Supra, sans hood, looked like a de-pantsed fifth-grader running around the track. Jayasinghe never told us if it cooled any better, but it sure did look scared.

With heat limiting the cars to one hot lap at a time, the two traded fastest laps until Mitchell eventually squeaked out a 0.13-second margin on his last attempt. The crowd in the Skyline pits went nuts. The Supra crew wasn't as thrilled. When it was over, the Supra had run a best of 1:22.09, while the Skyline managed a 1:21.96 giving the Skyline a much needed additional point. The rest of the action was anticlimactic. Scott Gladstone was fourth in the Sparco WRX, turning a respectable (for three cylinders) 1:25.03 followed closely by Michael Essa's rotary 510 at 1:26.43. Deric Massie's Type R and Dan Cokic's Eclipse, both being driven by stand-in drivers, were 5.34 and 5.63 seconds slower, respectively.

Somewhere in the middle of the confusion, James Chen turned his MR2 Spyder's third gear into shrapnel, which still allowed the use of the other four gears. The untimely failure occurred just before crossing the start/finish line, but rather than coasting across the line, Chen pulled into the pit road, thereby canceling his only chance at earning a lap time. After many shameless pleas for an arbitrary lap time assignment, USCC officials asked the crazed Chen to return to his trailer and think carefully about the many MR2 parts they lent him before the event. His irrational pleas were completely ignored. That was pretty much it. Joe Privitier's 3000GT VR-4 Spyder wasn't allowed to compete in the road course due to safety reasons, and Jerry Fink's SRX-7 had terminal fueling problems on its first hot lap.