Survival Of The FFittest - Event

If you don’t know about FF Battle by now, you’ll probably never know. For the rest of you, rejoice as FFB3 was by far and away the most epic collection of Hondas on General tires the world has ever seen. The first two years were a little shaky—but hey, we had to start somewhere. For 2011, we blew the training wheels off the mother-#&%er and cranked the Battle up to eleventy! With more cars, more breaking and more shit-talking, FFB3 will go down as the year that took FF Battle from six to midnight.

We took what little information our feeble brains managed to learn from the previous events and took some of the “bigger and better” mentality America is known for and decided to invite twice as many people for FFB3. With our superstreet247@gmail.com inbox stuffed (start submitting FFB4 entries now!), we had our work cut out for us making our final selections. Some were invites we gave to previous contestants, some were formal entries through our email and one just happened to be a reader’s ride we wanted to see on the track.

Since the one and only turbo car in FFB2 rocked the party, we decided to try and level the playing field by making this year’s contest an NA-only affair. Our final roster of 20 cars is an eclectic mix of previous competitors and new hopefuls. We have contestants from as far as Canada (more on that later in this issue) with skill levels ranging from seasoned veterans mixed in with first time ex-hardparkers. For the first time it looked as though the competition could be won by any number of cars. With a solid entry list on lock-down we were grinning from ear to ear and rubbing our hands together in anticipation.

The basic premise for calculating a winner went unchanged since last year, the best mix of power and lap time gets the gold. However, we adjusted the scoring to reflect a curve based on the highest-powered car and fastest lap time rather than arbitrarily awarding points like we did last year. Once all the contestants got their new General G-MAX AS-03 tires mounted up, we’d wrangle them together and spend two days trying to figure out who’s bringing the heat and who’s full of hot air.

The first day of the competition started out at “some race shop in Temple City”, better known as Raceline, where our friend, and FF Battle contestant, Elton Lo would be manning the rollers and keeping everyone honest (we hope). Since last year’s dyno sesh was a 10-hour fustercluck, at the end of which yours truly was thoroughly de-hydrated rendering myself a projectile-vomiting mess, we imposed a strict schedule with time slots for every competitor. Missing your time slot resulted in a harsh penalty of 25 points and a thorough stink-eye from your peers.

It should come as no surprise that the K-series cars rocked the living piss out of the dyno contest. Several cars made over 230hp but Ryan Novak’s EK was on some straight next-level shit. I don’t know if that motor had tiger’s blood pumping through its injectors but it spun the rollers to the tune of 269hp… and then exploded itself, making it the first in a line of FFB casualties. Tom “Tom-Attak” Liang was another K-bomber having some issues as he was unable to get his EF up and running after arriving at Raceline. Turned out to be an alternator fuse related issue and a 15-amper was the ticket to great success.

Over in the B-series camp, numbers were a little lower, as we expected, but at least all the cars made it on and off the dyno without any drama. The king of the B-series cars was Gilbert Corona’s EF, pumping out 191 ponies. Amazingly most of the cars made their scheduled time slot and even with all the bullshitting amongst the competitors we were able to wrap up the dyno portion ahead of schedule—and I was able to stay completely hydrated. At the halfway point of FF Battle 3, it appeared as though we knew what we were doing.