Last week on Wednesday morning I made it out to K&N for the Ultimate Street Car Challenge as an “engineering guru”. The guru panel consists of 3 guys who are supposed to know thier stuff: me, Robert/Robi from Robispec, and Brian from Garrett. Brian was the turbo guru, Robi was the chassis/suspension guru, and I was the engine/fuel system/tuning guru. While I’ve seen Robi around at all the time attacks, this was the first time I got to talk to him. Both Robi and Brian were cool to work with. We judged 10 cars on their level of “set up” and engineering. This was my first time on the guru panel, but I’ve competed once officially and have helped campaign cars in previous years. XS won with Kim Johnson’s BNR34 GT-R back in 2005. The cars didn’t seem as crazy this year, but there were some nice cars regardless.
I’m not going to talk too much about the cars (buy Sport Compact Car when it comes out in a couple months), but there was a crazy old school E30 325i with an X5 4.4L V8 in it. To fit big tires in the rear, Groma Fabrications built a pushrod suspension and tied it all in to the cage. It also had a Rotrex supercharger and a shot of NOS. Pretty cool little car.
AMS brought out their EVO X and while it wasn’t too heavily modded, I think they did just about everything they could to it considering that aren’t many parts available. They did fabricate a GT35R turbo system and tune the stock ECU with the Ecutek software to the tune of 4xxwhp. I’m not going to give it away since you should buy the magazine, but let’s just say it was 13hp short of 500whp. All haters of the 4B11T because it is aluminum are lame. It is a damn good engine and while it may not handle 1100whp like the 4G63 block, I think it should be able to handle way more than the average joe can throw at it.
There were also some other cool cars like the very clean Technosquare 350z, but I think the SCC guys would prefer for me the shut up here. Get the mag.