December 01, 2004 - Scion is like the Terminator. It just doesn't stop and it doesn't give up. The youthful automaker does a damn good job of always putting on events and keeping the name and vehicles in the minds of enthusiasts and press guys alike. Today, Scion threw its second annual Scion Performance Challenge. Last year the manufacturer gathered a group of journos and had us fight to the death.

Well, no one died, but they did battle it out amongst each other for a trip to Hawaii. Our own Hong Le was on hand. If you didn't catch the story then, you can check the 2003 Scion battle out now. This year the game is a little different. Instead of road racing with karts, Scion mixed things up by taking us out to Pomona Fairplex and testing our mettle at the 1/8th mile drag at one of the world's most famous strips.

I was supposed to arrive on Tuesday--that's yesterday in case you forget days as much as I do. Anyway, we missed out on the grand dinner and watching the editor from Overboost get stinking drunk. Instead we spent last night writing our Christmas list to Santa.

But don't worry nothing on our list is for you and the only thing we will get isn't on our list, a giant piece of coal. Back to Scion, call us crazy (like SuperJerryGuy), but I thought the event was at Irwindale Speedway. As such, I crashed nearby. Long story short, the event was obviously at Pomona Fairplex.

I've seen drag racing, I've been in pro-drag cars for demo runs and that's about the extent of my legal drag racing experiences. This is one writer who fully expected to get knocked out in the first round. C'mon with a first pass of about 13 seconds my 1/8th times were looking more like fast quarter-miles.

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The entire group of press had three practice runs before the single-elimination tournament. I had no clue how all the info on the time slip works and it took Christian Rado and a few other drag experts to explain exactly what all those numbers mean on the white sheet of paper. I'm looking at all my time slips and I still don't know what they mean.

What I do know is that all the Scion tC's that were used for racing were of the automatic transmission variety. It was a wise choice on Scion corporate's part as the slushbox transmissions weren't lookin' so good by the end of the day. Imagine what harm we could have done to some manual transmission tCs.

Most contestants were using a brake-start. That is, pressing down on the brake with the left foot while revving up the engine with the right foot. Once the stage was set and the light hit green the tC would take off significantly faster than a normal street start.

There's a certain guilty-pleasure associated with drag racing and I, now, can see why. It's not real racing, but, damn, it sure is fun. So, will Scion throw another Performance Challenge in 2005. I sure hope so, making the quarter final round is good for our first time and all, but the IGN staff wants laugh in the face of competing editors, not the other way around.

The good news is that today's festivities were a blast. And even though we're losers we got to take some photos and see all the fun you missed out on. Scion had fanatical LA-based owners bring out their pimped-out Scions and had food, drinks and goodies for everyone. Even the man who made drag racing, Wally Parks, was out ready to kick ass. '05 is just around the corner, what's next? Scion has already done road racing, dragging, maybe a Scion drift event? Naw...

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