Tanked said:
Paolo, When you finnish your single (or was it twin turbo setup) Are you going to go for the Ulimate Street Car Challenge again?
I was never would have guess a 350Z would have beat out your GTS. Do you think SCC was biased?
I never did hear what you thought about the contest. Or...was it just that I wasn't on the boards at that time.
But at any rate. Good Job. I still have the articals. :thumb:
Tanked, I am doing a twin setup on my car that is getting there, the Viper single turbo system I will start building over the winter.
I will definitely be shooting fo rthe USCC 2005 with my car.
I looked for all the threads on this subject but could not find them.
To put it into a nutshell, After the Dyno portion of the competition, I had 220 Points and the next closest car had around 145 points.
There was a driveability, grandma, emissions test/etc... which I knew I would not dominate like the dyno.
Paul Mumford's car won the driveability test from the year before with a perfect 100 points. The guy gave my car something like 33 points for driveability. It took the magazine driver about 5 minutes to get the Ultima GTR out of the parking lot after repeated stalling/etc. That car got some 50 points for driveability. How did that happen, I do not know.
The base price was a contest that basically gave the cheapest car the most points and the most expensive car the least amount of points. I was the 2nd highest price car at around 66K(all prices were calculated as the bone stock car the year it was made regardless of the mods). Now, as some people know, the Ultima GTR is around 90K plus engine and drivetrain. This guy had a bored and stroked BMW V-12 engine, HRE 547 wheels, kangaroo skin interior, onboard datalogging.... The guy lied through his teeth and said he got the engine out of the junkyard for $500.00 and you can guess the rest of the story....More on th base price later...
Another test was the guru panel where they see how many things you have modified on your car and how well it was done. A relatively stock car should score very low in this category. My car with full roll cage, built motor with ceramic coated internals and billet main caps and the whole 9 yards got beaten in this category by both eclipses with nowhere near the mods this category is supposed to measure.
So at the end of the first day with all the subjective tests out of the way, I was in 3rd place overall even with the 33 point driveability score.
The second day was all the good stuff, skidpad, road course, dragstrip, 0-60,60-0 and Gross display of HP(burnout contest)... All categories my car had a very good chance to dominate.
I pulled 1.096 G's on a sandy,dusty skidpad which was good for 2nd behind the 2300# Ultima's 1.13.
All the other cars that beat me on the road course had professional drivers.
To make matters worse, the car with 900 RWHP simply ran too hot on the road course go go for more than a few turns at a time before the coolant temperature hit around 230 degrees. So I decided to get the general feel of the roadcourse but never really got to hot lap. I turned off the car and ran last so my car was the coolest it was going to get. I did an easy warm-up lap and did one, conservative lap and shut the car down after a brief cooldown and the temp was fine. I also ran conservatively because the Skyline blew the motor and I did not want to take a chance with a too high powered car I had never driven on any roadcourse much less the California Speedway one.
Now here is where I believe things got twisted by the magazine guys:
The points leading Skyline blew up and the Viper got very close to the maximum points on the skid pad and did fair on the roadcourse.
I am sure the SCC staff or it's readers did not want to see another Viper win;
The Ultima Guy was complaining his car should only be listed as 25K because that's all the parts cost him and he did all the labor himself(liar). So the SCC staff gave it to him. I remember Before this, I had around 67 points before they changed his base price and he had something like 20 points.==> AFTER the change, he had some 77 Points from the 20 some he had. SO after the price change the Ultima guy gained some 90 points on me. By the end of the contest, The winning car only beat me by some 110 points.
There were also some games played with the 1/4 mile and braking.
First they said we would get only one 1/4 mile pass and 2 braking tries.
I hooked as well as I could and the fastest AWD cars launching on all 4 Hoosiers only beat me by about .2 seconds 0-60. It was very dusty and there was no VHT at all. This dragstrip was way slicker than the regular street driving I do.
After I hooked up really well and Dave Blankenbaker saw a 12.1 @ 150+ for the ET and MPH(1st place), they said they would give everybody another pass. I missed 2nd-3rd briefly on the 2nd run.
As for the braking, without ABS, I locked up the fronts on the dusty stopping area and bit the big one. We were supposed to get 2 tries, but after I locked them up I think they said, perfect chance to put the Viper lower... OK boys let's get to the gross Display of HP which I resoundingly won and basically smoked the tires so badly, they were rubbing on the fenderwells because the middle 6 inches had gained about 3-4 inches of circumference.
Anyway, I cannot blame them for making the the imports come out on top. It was fun as hell to say the least.....
If you look at all the issues of Turbo MAgazine since Feb. 2004, There has been a full page ad to sell the USCC 2003 DVD(with my car on the cover). :thumb:
