Base Price
There are several ways to determine the base price of each USCC competitor. Researching past issues, digging through old press kits, and bugging auto manufacturer PR people are some of the options we considered. In the end, we decided the simplest and fairest way was to look them up on MSNautos.com. This website has a handy reference area that lists the manufacturer's suggested retail price for every car in our challenge, except for the Skyline. For that, we did a bit of internet sleuthing to find the MSRP in Japan, which we then converted to dollars. Is this an accurate assessment of how much the vehicles actually cost when they arrive at our competition? Absolutely not. Many of the USCC cars were purchased secondhand for significantly less than their MSRP, and all of them had several thousand dollars of modifications added on. But assigning points by base price serves a valuable purpose: it levels out the playing field by allowing us to take into account the inherent advantages of exotic and expensive performance cars. For example, our lowest priced competitor this year is HASport's 1988 Honda CRX Si. At $10,720, it is almost $55,000 cheaper than the most expensive contender, Danny Young's 1992 Acura NSX. Would 55 grand invested into a CRX help it beat a stock NSX? We don't know, but wouldn't that grudge match be interesting? That's the spirit we're after. Like last year, nobody went over six figures on the base price. In fact, we're happy to report that eight of the ten stayed under $35,000. Does that sound like we have a crop of reasonably priced, possibly boring street cars this year? Just wait until you see the engineering shots and dyno pulls. We can assure you that cubic dollars were spent to turn many sensible shoes into track spikes. Next year, we're changing the way we determine price in a way that we hope will more accurately reflect the true value of each competitor. It will probably be hugely controversial, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
-Edward Loh
The Big Picture
A CRX is in the lead and beating a GT-R and an NSX!Oh wait, we're only on the first test. This will all change dramatically, but that's a deep hole to start off in for the NSX of Young and Co. The biggest deception here is perpetrated by the guys at HPA. To make a big power turbo kit and factory-fresh all-wheel-drive system like theirs, you'd need to add an extra zero to the base price.
| RANK | CAR | BASE PRICE | POINTS |
| 1 | HASport CRX Si | $10,720 | 110 |
| 2 | HPA Beetle RSI | $17,630 | 97 |
| 3 | Robispec Lancer Evolution | $27,929 | 78 |
| 4 | Crawford Performance WRX STI | $31,120 | 72 |
| 5 | Paul Dentice’s Skyline GT-R | $31,800 | 71 |
| 6 | APR Performance Subaru WRX STI | $32,445 | 70 |
| 7 | Mike Schaezler’s Mazda RX-7 | $32,900 | 69 |
| 8 | XS Engineering/M-Works Nissan 350Z | $34,180 | 67 |
| 9 | Prototype Racing Elise | $42,990 | 51 |
| 10 | Danny Young’s NSX | $65,000 | 10 |