Bang For Your Bucks

NASTY WEATHER WASN’T GOING TO STOP US FROM NAMING AUSTRALIA’S BEST NEW FAST CAR UNDER $100K

- Scott Newman

OUR LUCK HAD to run out eventually. After years of being blessed with the weather for Bang For Your Bucks (BFYB – our annual mega-test to find Australia’s best value new performance car under $100K) and not having to worry about anything more than a brief shower, 2019 broke the streak in fine fashion. And we were unlucky. Winton Motor Raceway, ostensibly the current ‘home’ of BFYB, hadn’t had rain worth the name in more than six months and the days either side of our booking were fine and sunny but BFYB isn’t a logistically flexible operation. Still, excellent news for farmers and the like who are doing it tough in the surrounding regions.

At least we weren’t taken by surprise. A week out from the event the forecast predicted nothing but doom and gloom, allowing us to form a back-up plan. There is absolutely no point in trying to hold a credible data-based competition in anything other than dry conditions. Not only would a slippery surface unfairly favour certain all-wheel drive contestants, but the chances of the track being equally wet for all cars were precisely zero, so the only fair course of action was to make BFYB 2019 a purely subjective competition.

That’s what we’ve done for 50 per cent of the mark – replacing all the performance data we usually collect, such as lap time, 0-400m, 0-100km/h and so on – with subjective judges’ rankings. This will make up ‘Bang’. ‘Bucks’, meanwhile, as something not affected by the weather, continues to be crunched through the regular formula that has guided our competition since 1994. Points for Bang and Buck are determined, and then crunched together within our formula for a Bang For Your Bucks score which sorts out the all-important finishing order.