2006 Ultimate Street Car Challenge

Fuel Economy
The Shell station off Iowa Street should be ready for us by now. Each year, our thirsty competitors fund in-ground swimming pools or wall-to-wall carpeting for the homes of each and every swill-pumping employee in the place. With gas at about $3.50 a gallon this year, they were set to make another killing.

But they didn't. After we filled up the first car (Robert Fuller's Evo), the pump refused to work. Then all the pumps decided to stop pumping 91-octane. With nine tuner cars clogging the small station, chaos immediately ensued. Other customers wanted gas, and it was our fault they weren't getting it.

Finally, an attendant emerged and found the problem was underground, and not a result of our incompetence. While said attendant dug around under the pumps, Marcel Horn of HPA happily filled his Beetle with 87-octane and sputtered off. The other competitors held out for the good stuff-many had already topped off with race gas, needing less than a gallon of California's finest. A little over an hour off schedule, the fueling problem was fixed and the remaining cars finally hit the road.

Our 70.7-mile test consists of a grueling uphill stretch, a highway jaunt, and what is essentially a downhill luge. Most of the entrants cut their cars off completely during the long downhill section, keeping buttcheeks tightly clenched for some of the tighter corners and allowing gravity to hurtle them to the bottom. Almost every car sported over-inflated tires and drafted whoever was unfortunate enough to be the vehicle in front. A few of the tuners, like Crawford Performance, actually had an entirely different ECU tune to run extra-lean during this test.

The extra-lean tune was largely responsible for Crawford's walk-away victory in the end, the STI posting an unbelievable 42.5mpg average and sporting the whitest exhaust tip we have ever seen.

At the other end of the spectrum, APR wasn't so lucky with the same make and model car, netting 16.5mpg.

Almost as soon as the combatants started to trickle into the tiny Mobil station at the end of our route, drama erupted. A few had taken wrong turns and amassed a greater number of miles. Others were sure everyone else had cheated, offering incredible theories of electronic trickery and gas station manipulation. In the end, we laid down the law: the course was 70.7 miles-if people had gotten lost, their mileage would suffer as a result.
-James Tate

The Big Picture
Oh, the strange things we do in the name of competition. And we're not talking about just the wacky gas-saving driving techniques, either. What about descending upon random gas stations in the middle of nowhere with ten loud and obnoxious cars all wanting to use the same pump on the same credit card?

And it just gets weirder. Crawford's highly suspect mileage catapults him within striking distance of the leaders, who have only grown closer due to relatively poor finishes. As Day One draws to a close, we're looking at a tight three-horse race.