MUSCLE CAR FIGHT

Modern and classic Pro Touring muscle battle on the track at Optima’s Ultimate Street Car race.

- STEVEN RUPP

Optima’s Search for the Ultimate Street Car, presented by Advance Auto Parts, lives up to its name every time it runs. This series is more than just great drivers, showstopping paintjobs, and 1,000-horsepower track freaks. It’s all of that and more wrapped up into a whirlwind weekend at some of the world’s best tracks. Stop number six in this series was iconic Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, and the first event out of the gate was the Falken Tire Road Course Time Trial on the big track.

If you’ve never run at Road America before, know that it requires your complete respect and attention. There are elevation changes galore, technical turns, and three high-speed straightaways, each one with a progressively hairier braking zone. It will test every aspect of your car, and mechanical attrition surprises no one. If that wasn’t tough enough, competitors leave the big track and head straight for the Peak Performance Challenge, which involves a hard launch, hard brake into a hairpin turn, another hard launch, and a hard stop inside a 40-foot box.

By the end of the day, a dozen of the 70 entrants failed to make the Lucas Oil Road Rally, worth 100 of 500 available points on the weekend. Among the mechanical casualties was Chris Smith’s ’70 Camaro, which was poised to contend for the Classic Car Liquidators GTV Class championship. The series gives you seven chances to come up with your three best finishes to count toward your season-long point total. Smith put together a magical combination en route to a class championship in 2019, but only running three events leaves no margin for error.