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To contrast the S10 of Bill Speed is this Street AWD class Subaru Impreza WRX STi of Craig Peyron. He entered this car in this configuration at Super Lap Battle and as a result, it bumped him out of Enthusiast Class that he had run all year. It also leads up to a funny story later on.
In Street Class, you can't run any aerodynamics other than what came on the car from the factory. There wasn't enough time between SLB and the final round of Redline to change out to a rear wing that would work better, but it wasn't as much of a disadvantage as you would think. At Fontana, most cars were running minimal wing and splitter angles so they wouldn't lose much speed going around the “roval” portion. While the wing wasn't enough to give him a leg up on the winner, it was enough to provide the downforce he needed to make his car driveable. He was less than 3 seconds off the pace of the winner's time in Street Class.
His time of 1:48.127 put him squarely in second place in Street Class and he would have qualified at the head of the MPTCC field. The fastest pole time at Fontana 2 for the MPTCC was a 1:52.186 by Andrie Hartanto in the Supertech Honda S2000. To further add to this, Andrie's pole time would only net him 4th in Street Class, if his car was legal to compete.
Craig would have also placed 2nd in Modified AWD Class and 3rd in Modified RWD. Don't forget, this is the same class that requires a 50mm restrictor at the turbo inlet and Craig wasn't even the fastest.
Previously, I had mentioned that the class bump led up to a funny story. Craig was in Enthusiast AWD Class leading up to Super Lap Battle and was in first place. However, the points in Enthusiast AWD was very close and Craig had to complete a run at Fontana to ensure that he would receive just enough points to win the championship. Well, the modifications on his STi could not be changed in time to do both classes and he didn't want to lose the championship. So, in comes the Subaru XV Crosstrek that belongs to his very, very understanding wife and comes with a CVT transmission.
Yes, you can accurately predict his finishing position of last place but it was all he needed to win the Enthusiast AWD class championship. It's also not quite the end of the story. Redline broke up the cars into two groups; Unlimited, Modified and Street were in one group while Enthusiast was in a group by itself. The moment that the first group was done, Craig had to hop out of his STi and run down to the grid where the XV was waiting on him to drive. The XV's time was a blistering 2:27.009.
Hey, it was faster than any of us had expected and probably had the most comfortable ride out of all of the cars in the field that day.
