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Go forward a few more months and my racing buddy Dan (pronounced “Don” but don’t call him Dan/Don, he hates it) Gardner of Jackson-Dawson Racing is pondering what sort of car to prepare for NASA’s 2007 racing season in their new Prepared Touring class. In Prepared Touring cars are classified in various classes from A to G according to their stock ability. Different performance modifications are assigned different penalty points and if you modify your car, you add up the points for each mod, which can push you into a higher class. Once you figure out what mods a particular car needs to be raceable, you add up your points and see which class you end up in. If you do a good job of selecting the right car and add the right mods to compensate for the cars weak points while staying in a reasonable class, you end up with a winning car. This makes PT a fun and challenging race series that encourages tuner involvement because the modification points system reduces the chances that one particular car can dominate a class, which is a problem in SCCA SS and IT racing.
Dan spent many weeks agonizing on which car would be the winning car for a class, analy crunching numbers every night until he came up with the thought that a modified Scion tC would be the car to have for PTE with the right mods. Dan contacted me for advice and was off to build the ultimate tC.
On paper the tC looked good. It had a 2.4 liter DOHC 2AZFE engine with McPherson struts up front and multi link suspension in the rear. It had decently sized 4 wheel disc brakes. Also importantly a decent aftermarket existed for the car and we could rely on information learned about how the cars faired on the track from Toyota Motorsport’s Celebrity race car program.
