First Annual Hotchkis Media Challenge

We usually look forward to the On Track Day held every year at Buttonwillow Raceway Park north of Los Angeles. This event was created to give enthusiasts the opportunity to wring out their cars on a real circuit. For us it means free track time and the chance to hang with the good people from Hotchkis Performance, Baer, Flowmaster, and Yokohama-the masterminds behind this deal.

But this year's track day featured a new twist: the first annual Hotchkis Media Challenge. John Hotchkis and his crew wanted to test our mettle. They wanted to know if we were up to the challenge. Well, we have no mettle, and we've never been really big on "rising to a challenge." In fact, we try to avoid such endeavors altogether as they normally result in failure.

Much like us, the rules of the Media Challenge were simple. Hotchkis invited a select number of magazines, many of which were our sister publications. Every rag from Hot Rod to Honda Tuning was in the house. Each magazine was required to field a current project car with an editorial staff member behind the wheel of said car. There were four separate events: a 600-foot slalom, a standing quarter-mile, 60-0 braking, and a timed lap around the road course.

Even though we are far too familiar with the pungent stench of defeat, something encouraged us to answer the challenge. Call it courage, call it pride, call it memory loss; we obviously forgot how badly we normally get spanked in any sort of competition. We needed an edge, something to give us an advantage over everyone else. Some may call it low-down, dirty cheating, but that is such an ugly phrase. We prefer to call it a resourceful interpretation of the rules, or a creative loophole.

With the exception of R. Daddy, we never really spin the wrenches on our project cars, relying on the services of competent tuners. Such is the case with the Skunk2 Project Civic RR (Road Race). We've been documenting its progress for the past few months for your reading pleasure. When the time came for us to field a viable entry, we turned to the Skunk2 crew for the assist. After all, the car is featured in our pages (story alert! look for an update elsewhere in this issue), and it is a current project car. It just wasn't our car, per say. To further blur the lines of good sportsmanship, we even convinced eurotuner's own Phil Royle to borrow his sister's Miata for the day (sidebar alert!). Phil's not exactly a Super Streeter, but his sister's cute little car is an officially sanctioned project vehicle because we love cute, cuddly things (uh, the car, not Phil).

On race day we arrived just in time for the driver's meeting, but the Skunk2 boys were running late. We later learned that they were wrenching on the Si for three days straight in order to prep it for our fun little challenge. When they did roll up to the track, it was not with a rusty open-wheel trailer, but rather the complete Skunk2 big rig. This is the Big Unit, the Shaq Diesel, the, dare we say, Lord Humongous. If there was a Honda inside, it could have just as easily been Jacques' Lucky Strike BAR car instead of the Skunk2 Civic RR.

Skunk2's big boss, Dave Hsu, even drove the rig himself. As the director of motorsports for Skunk2 John "Johnny O" Omundson and Chris Versteegh unloaded the corner weighting scales, we knew they had overestimated our skills behind the wheel. Dave and his crew were ready to win this thing; we were just trying not to repeat any of more of our embarrassing episodes-like the time we had to pull off the track because we actually made ourselves carsick.