Ultimate Street Car Challenge - 8 Emissions

13 Lap TimesEveryone seems to forget that the road course portion of the USCC is only worth 110 points. Bragging rights aside, it's far easier to beat everyone else's pants off with a really clean-running car in the emissions test, so that you walk away with at least a 70-point lead. But the fixation remains on who's fastest around a track.

Our road course this time is different from years past. We've kept the full-tread R-compound tire limitation, but decided to run the Streets of Willow at Willow Springs Raceway in its full configuration, instead of the shortest. It's a winding, low-speed, 1.8-mile course, now with three sections for our big-power contenders to stretch their legs. Traditionally, all-wheel-drive or light compacts have excelled here.

As it happens, the fastest car was neither light nor all-wheel-drive. We were skeptical that the 650hp racer would stay on the track, since it barely stayed on the dyno, but Danny Young's no-expense-spared NSX hung a whopping three-second lead on the rest of the pack as the last runner of the day. For a track this short and twisty, such a margin is ridiculous. Set up and driven by Grand Am/Daytona driver Eric Messley of EMI Racing Suspension, the NSX once again shows that a 20-year-old mid-engine supercar isn't something to be taken lightly, even if it's sideways at mid-point down the front straight.

At a distant but still impressive second was Steve Mitchell in the XS Engineering/M-Works Nissan 350Z, running a 1:30.72. Although it lost points in other areas for its racing nature, the track/drift machine nailed the handling tests as intended. But it had to share this spot with Crawford Performance's WRX STI. Only two hundredths of a second separated Mitchell and Crawford's NASA hot-shoe, Russ Warr. The fact the WRX has a full interior and no cage is still no excuse.

Robert Fuller of Robispec was at the helm of both third and fourth place finishers, the Robispec Evo IX RS and APR's WRX STI respectively. He also set them up. Neither car finished all five laps, though. The APR car experienced continuous boost leaks and was finally taken out by a bad e-throttle. The Evo's headgasket blew, ending Fuller's day before the Skidpad or Gross Display Of Horsepower trials.

The rest of the pack were plagued by typical track abuse issues. HASport's time attack CRX made big power, but had all the predictability of a bi-polar five-year-old. Mike Schaezler's RX-7 burned enough oil to put a James Bond smoke screen to shame. Too bad, since driver Andy Hope said it easily had another three seconds in it. Our underdog favorite Lotus Elise suffered from tired heat-cycled tires and HPA's Beetle was down to three axles and a really confused Haldex all-wheel-drive system. But by this point, the winner of our 2006 USCC had pretty much locked in its victory.-Jay Chen

The Big PictureAll the NSX had to do to win was finish better than dead last. And with HPA's Beetle hurting so bad, that would not have been a problem. Instead, Young's driver, Eric Messley put on a racing clinic and demolished the field to take an insurmountable lead.

Fourth place and 95 points are just enough for Crawford to squeak past HPA into second overall, but it's not rock solid. If HPA pulls off a miracle on the Skipad and decides to sacrifice the car in the Gross Display of Horsepower, they could finish first runner-up.