Any progress?
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It’s taken a while, but I’ll start the scoring with the first and most important category of all: Coolness.
Round 1: Coolness
Chris and his wife were searching the online and print classifieds (including various auction websites) for something special to put in his garage. To kick things off, he started with the most important criterion of all: coolness, i.e. what appealed to him the most.
After some deliberation, the coolest car was the Zephorus Grimsel - a mid-engined supercar with a V10 engine (something that only Cosworth makes nowadays) is too tempting for Chris’ heart to resist.
For being one of the few actual supercars in the field (and also the only car here with a V10 engine), the Grimsel earns the full 20 points.
The “least cool” award, on the other hand, goes to… the Quix Discopop.
It’s more quirky than cool, and not really a performance car either, so it gets a -20 point score for coolness right off the bat.
Standings after Round 1 (now with brief explanations!)
- 1st: Zephorus Grimsel (20pts) - One of only a few true supercars here, and the most likely car to serve as bedroom wall poster fodder. That shrieking V10 - a unique attribute in this 20-car field - is icing on the cake.
- 2nd: Rocket Venus (18pts) - Almost as good as the Grimsel, but not quite good enough to dethrone it. Still a genuine supercar, though, and ticks all the objective and subjectiveboxes.
- 3rd: Nordwagen Loki S-8x4 (16pts) - Chris doesn’t think its looks can match those of the Rocket or Zephorus, but it’s still more than worthy of supercar status, in terms of straight-line and cornering performance.
- 4th: Gipfe SC40DTI (14pts) - The most convincing of the modern (2010 and later) entries. The only complaint from Chris is that he would prefer it to be a bit more… analogue, and a lesser trim level with RWD and/or a manual gearbox (but preferably sharing the same engine) would be just that.
- 5th: Primus Legacy SV500 (12pts) - The only 4-door sedan of the bunch holds its own against a stacked field. Its Q-car factor is too undeniable for Chris to resist.
- 6th: Strenus Sylphide HT4 (10pts) - A butch and muscular rally homologation special, made better with 5-door practicality. The performance is also commensurate with the styling
- 7th: Wells SideWinder SS (8pts) - A decent FR coupe, but needs a bit more flair on the outside to match its performance and handling.
- 8th: Winchester Warrior (6pts) - Almost a 1:1 replica of a base C4 Corvette from the same era, but even in their most basic form, those have never been bad cars, either.
- 9th: Aero Flow (3pts) - Superficially a more aero-influenced (if soap bar-like) knockoff of a Vector M12, but the exterior styling seems unfinished in places. It’s still a supercar in Chris’ view, but needs even more power.
- 10th: Yajirushi 290 CTC (0pts) - You know you’re in for a tough time when a JDM coupe such as this finds itself in the middle of the pack. There’s no denying its performance, though, but it needs more “X factor”, so to speak.
- 11th: Busan Pegasus Coupe (-2pts) - Busan is getting back in the sports car game, and this is a nice homage to its earlier attempts at the genre, but in such a strong field, it, too, feels overshadowed by several cars that just happened to have even more of a “wow factor”.
- 12th: Knightwick GoodWood Coupe (-4pts) - An FF coupe with FR proportions is a questionable idea, to say the least (especially considering the transversely mounted engine on this one), but the GoodWood Coupe still has the moves to provide a rousing drive.
- 13th: DAW Corsica Mojarra (-6pts) - A bit too toylike for Chris’ liking (especially from the front), but at least it’s fast (and fun) enough, and it’s not some meme machine either. What saves it from placing any lower is its novelty factor of being the only rear-engined car of the bunch.
- 14th: Oryu Destriero GTS (-8pts) - It’s a coupe, sure, but one whose styling is a bit basic (especially up front, where the headlights seem a bit too low to the ground). Its performance is more than sufficiently competitive for this field, though.
- 15th: Ayatsuji Myosotis GSR Spec-V (-10pts) - Chris isn’t averse to 3- or 5-door wagons, but he thinks this one would look, feel, and most importantly, be far better as a conventional coupe (or convertible) - the wagon rear end doesn’t seem to gel as well with the coupe nose as it should.
- 16th: Lepus GT (-12pts) - An AWD hot hatch is cool, but this one looks a bit too… dull, at least when compared to the Strenus. It should be just a little bit flashier (at least on the outside - a bigger front spoiler at the front and/or rear could do the trick) to finish higher in the coolness stakes.
- 17th: Kato Celerita (-14pts) - It may be touted as a 4-door coupe, but Chris is struggling to tell it apart from a generic family sedan of the same era; it needs 2 fewer doors and a lot more pizzazz.
- 18th: Norrsken Esox R (-16pts) - A solid performer, but the nearly upright, squared-off front is at odds with the sloped glasshouse, and makes it look needlessly dated. If the front fascia were more steeply angled, it would have placed higher.
- 19th: Mara Paragon 4.0 KSE (-18pts) - A V8 Mara with a convertible top (of any kind) is still a Mara, but this one seems decent on paper… until you get to the side view and its weird proportions.
- 20th: Quix Discopop 1.7 AWD (-20pts) - Too quirky to be cool. It could be a great daily driver, though, if Chris can make a case for it.
Stay tuned for Part 2!
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I assumed we would get some kind of reasoning behind the scores for each car at least at this stage since it is subjective
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I think you should add maybe explanations for the scoring
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I agree. That has kind of been the idea behind this. Sure, it’s a no brainer why a car with 50 driveability is worse than 80, but the part that 's actually not number crunching is somewhere where you want to know how well you hit the target or not.
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I literally built an R32 GTI which is on the supercool wall and it got -12 points???
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I genuinely don’t understand the coolness scoring at all. It feels like you just randomized the scores. We have always gotten individual review for each car for the first round. After that it’s just the best / worst.
Eh, there’s a discernable pattern to the coolness/styling, and I don’t dispute it. But it deserves elaboration regardless
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Correction: the Grimsel isn’t the only true supercar I got for CW7 after all. I did, however, provide detailed explanations as to why I ranked each car in its position.
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Out of curiosity, would DCT have made any difference to the coolness of the Gipfe if not analog enough was the complaint? And how much did having 6 cylinders increase it? My car is largely based on the F-Type from sub-zero, which is an i4
Yeah, good call on the coolness. On a challenge based around it, direct feedback there is good to have.
Another suggestion with Coolness: typically the coolness scale works differently than the rest of the points, in that it isn’t relative to the best or worst. The cool wall already sets the standard for what the points are and cars are ranked based on where they’d fall there, regardless of how anyone else does.
So there’s no obligation to make one car 20 and one car -20 just to fill out the ends. If the Quix really was on par with the Nissan Tama or Reliant Robin in Chris’ eyes, it could earn a -20, but if it’s more akin to that Citroen convertible it could’ve also gotten -9;. it doesn’t have to be -20 just because its the worst (and vice versa for the Zephorus; if it and the Venus were on par, for example, they get the same score)
I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with doing it that way. I’m honestly curious what happens when Coolness is a guaranteed 40-point gap. But that’s the expectation many of us had going in, and I wanted to make sure you knew it’d previously worked that way.
Regardless, finally fun to hear back on this! I’m interested where we’ll go from here.
In general, more cylinders = more coolness. And the reason why Chris wanted it to be a bit more analog was his preference for it to be offered in a RWD trim level, and/or with a manual gearbox. Even so, it still managed to place fourth overall on the coolness list.
Also, a high negative score (for being more on the “uncool” side of the spectrum) indicates that the car is is either at odds with the buyer’s tastes, or hasn’t been sufficiently well-executed compared to others.
Could you maybe explain a bit more what you mean on my enty, Im not sure i quite understand
As a follow-up: how about Advanced AWD as the front wheels can be switched off? I wanted that but it went over budget
The ‘75 Starion bodies’ upper front end can be morphed to be nearly parallel to the vertical axis at one extreme, and heavily sloped at the other.
Tell me, is there another way to get this kind of retro modern styling? Or even close?
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There might be such a way. By using a certain body set, setting its body material to transparent, and using 3D fixtures to create a whole new body shell and interior, you could get similar results - however, it’s a more difficult method of achieving the same effect, and one that requires a lot of practice to master.
The real reason the Busan Coupe scored so low, however, is that as cool as it was, Chris still found it to be overshadowed by many other entries that outperformed it in sheer wow factor.
I shall note that solution proposed would be…fair bit of an issue.
...due to very varying skill levels regarding 3D modelling inside of community (Example: U S.S. BEHEMOTH)
Skyline_Fox, creator of BEHEMOTH, could be easily regarded as being one of most skilled designers in our community. The fact first top-level example I would find as example of excellent 3D skills is not a car doesn’t matter; if anything, you simply KNOW it is nothing short of 3D build because of its non-car nature.
Basara isn’t fully 3D build, but it’s 3D enough to serve as opposing example. Designer of this car is not particularly highly regarded in terms of his design skills, even if you don’t take his very limited experience on matter of 3D. Car was made for competition regarding early 2000s supercars. It’s not made on supercar body.
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It may divide opinion, but there’s no doubt that the Basara counts as an example of the approach I just described.