2004 Ultimate Street Car Challenge

Test 2 Car Show

They can be your best friends or your worst enemies. They're our geeks, and they know more than you do. The engineering judging is the hardest of our tests and it's the hardest to accept if you don't do well. Lose the quarter mile and it's because someone else's car is faster, but lose the engineering judging and it's because these geeks don't like your car. Harsh.

That's why we get really good geeks. John Concialdi has built more racecars than you've owned shirts and he founded this little company called Advanced Engine Management. Jay Kavanagh manages all the engineering stuff in Garrett's aftermarket division. James Yim runs K&N's R&D center. Mike Kent does stuff with lasers. And infrared stuff. You can't even see infrared!

Steve Ruiz started this little brake company called StopTech and knows as much about stopping as Concialdi knows about going. And then there's Jeff Cheechov. He founded Progress Suspension, so unless you founded AEM or StopTech, you should just bow down.

Of course, Marcel Horn also knows more than you. He started a little company called HPA, and his penchant for stuffing a VR6, two turbos and all-wheel drive in anything with a VW or Audi badge on it puts him pretty high on the geek scale himself. Somehow, though, his understated brute of an R32 Golf didn't get along well with our geek panel.

The drivetrain scored well on the elaborate system used by the panel (except where it was docked for details like a stock cooling system and an inline fuel pump with questionable crash-worthiness), but the rest of the car got shredded. The geeks were irate about the stock anti-roll bars and suspension bushings, the brake parts from other cars that had been transplanted without addressing brake proportioning, and the stock safety equipment matched with a decidedly unstock penchant for speed.

In short, it was docked for focusing more on comfort and Autobahn-style point-to-point earth gobbling than the all-around performance it would need in the rest of the contest. Still, even the geeks themselves were surprised to see this one end up dead last.

Pleasing the fickle panel is a skill best honed with experience, and experience apparently told Sean Morris that geeks like porn. The bottom of the R32 Skyline was littered with dirty pictures, but it's unclear whether the geeks were more excited by these or the hlins coil-overs, the trick bumpsteer-correcting trinkets, the Stack dash, the Accusump added to prevent a repeat of last year's catastrophic engine failure and the full complement of robust safety gear.

Even without naked chicks, the geeks were ecstatic about the Sparco EVO VIII. It wasn't just the meticulous construction, the trick custom fabrication or the cubic dollars spent on exotic hardware, it was the depth of knowledge the car's builders had. While our geeks can learn a lot looking at a car, they want to talk to the guys who built it. They don't just want to see what was done, they want to know why it was done.

Do the right thing for the wrong reason and your score will suffer. If the geeks ask how much weight you saved, for example, and you say "220 pounds total, 60 pounds of which was unsprung," they'll be really happy. If you can regurgitate alignment specs and describe the track testing that led you to them, they might even give you a hug.

That's how the Sparco EVO, which looked like it just rolled out of Dan Gurney's garage, and the Buschur/RRE EVO, which looked like it just got back from the National Association of Men Who Like Hammers Convention, nearly tied for the lead.Dave Coleman