Cue immediate disappointment, followed by a long and pensive pause... "F-it," you laugh to yourself, accepting defeat and allowing the up-beat, friendly ambience of the event to set in. You think back on the days spent tuning your ride with your bros, driving to the track together the night before, and the friendly, familial antics of early-morning prep. More than 25 laps around Buttonwillow's CW13 configuration has taught you more about driving your car than you'd expected, and you'll be heading home tonight satisfied that you couldn't have done it any better. But above it all, you've got something to work for next year. Cracking a smile, you think out loud, "This was a pretty badass day!"
The Great Equalizer
Because the Import Tuner STI vs. EVO Shootout is open to street-class competitors only, and because we wanted each vehicles' times to be indicative of how well they compared to each other, we thought it best require each to run only one set of the same, "spec" tire. And what better to outfit aggressive, high-performance street cars with, than an aggressive, ultra-high-performance street radial? One set of Continental's ContiSportContact 3s per car was enough not only to withstand a full day's worth of practice and competition, it actually helped some of our drivers realize better times than they could with their regular street tires. "The Contis surprised me," explains Ryan Gates, "Their grip was impressive, given their high tread life, and their stiff sidewalls gave them a `crisp' overall feel--much better than anticipated!"
Stock Vs. Stock
To measure how the modifications performed to our competing EVOs and STIs really improved their performance from stock, we threw a stock '08 STI and EVO X MR into the field for time-attack competition. Driven by Andy Hope, the EVO ran the fastest single-lap of the two, with a 2:05.245 to the STI's best of a 2:06.501--only 1.256 seconds faster than the Subie, but 8.089 seconds behind the day's fastest: AMS's lightly modded EVO X GSR, driven by AMS co-owner Martin Musial. The fastest Subie of the day--owned by our own Scott Tsuneishi and driven by resident wheelman Andy Hope--bested its stock counterpart by 4.857 seconds... with plenty of room to grow, Scott promises!
For exclusive relay race video, logon to importtuner.com