Super Lap Battle

Willow Springs International Raceway held the second round of our Super Lap Battle series in sunny SoCal. While the week-end's temperature was hitting 100-plus degrees, it was the competition on the track that made it a scorcher of a weekend.

Heading up our Unlimited Class, we saw three teams from our Long Beach Grand Prix event wage war once again. It was a classic battle of drivetrain configurations with AWD versus FR versus FF. Crawford brought its fresh from the factory '08 Subaru STI to rep for the all-wheel-drive camp, C-West/BC Brian Crower had its dry-carbon composite Honda S2000 for the FR guys and World Racing had the FF crew in full representation with its Scion tC piloted by Chris Rado.

At the end of the day, the FR camp laid the smack down on everyone else with the C-West/BC car driven by Tyler McQuarrie. They beat the Crawford and World Racing teams by four seconds. That said, both Crawford and World Racing were in the 1:27s, which is blazingly fast-but not compared to C-West's 1:23.141 time. It shows just how well prepped the S2000 is.

Over in our Street Class, we had a tight battle for First Place with Nils Lufven's Mitsubishi Evo XIII edging out Curtis Chen's Toyota Supra by only three-tenths of a second. While both cars were on Yokohama Advan Neova's it was the AWD drivetrain that gave the Evo the extra edge against the higher-horsepower Supra.

With the cars we've seen this year, the Finals at Buttonwillow on Nov. 12 are going to have the highest level of competition we've ever seen. Pay close attention in the next coming months as Turbo will bring you a sneak peak on a big-name Subaru WRX coming straight from Japan to do battle with the best from the U.S.