About a week ahead of the 2015 SEMA show I got a call from the people at Gran Turismo and they asked if I would be interested judging the Hot Rod class of the 2015 Gran Turismo awards at the event. I was flabbergasted but agreed almost immediately. How cool, right? It was exceptionally cool to do and it certainly helped me hustle around the show as I was able to visit many booths where cars needing to be judged were located. The Hot Rod class is interesting because there is no hard date cutoff of definition of what a hot rod is. Perfect for me because it allowed a pretty free approach for judging and judge I did. But first maybe I should explain how this all works.

There are five categories to be judged for the GT Awards. Best Domestic, Best Asian, Hot Rod, Truck, Best European. Each of those five categories have a judge. I was the guy for the Hot Rod class, Sean Holman who leads the truck group over the TEN was the Truck category judge, and I did not know any of the other guys. Basically we get the list of cars to judge on Monday night and then on Tuesday we do our judging, select the car we think should win our class, and then forward that information along with our reasons for the choice to the GT people. On Wednesday, Kazunori Yamauchi – the guy who created Gran Turismo itself – looks at the five cars we nominated, decides which one will be the ultimate winner and at a wild Vegas party on Wednesday night he makes the announcement.

The coolest part of the thing was the sheer amount of variety in the stuff I had to check out. Gazillion dollar pro touring builds,  the Icon Derelict, a 1978 Mustang II, straight axle gassers, and the list goes on and on. I decided to keep it quiet while judging. I approached the cars like normal guy with a camera at SEMA and went to town. I didn’t want anyone pitching me or anything like that.

Here’s a sampling of the cars I poured over:

Ultimately, I kept going back to a couple of things.

1.) I wanted the car to be BangShifty and cool.

2.) I wanted the car to be something that people playing the game would want to mess with.

3.) I wanted the car to be something my sons would crave to earn or unlock in the game.

So, now you know where my head was at. I’ll get to my pick in a minute but first I wanted to show you the five vehicles chosen by the judges to vie for the ultimate award, which is the inclusion into an upcoming version of Gran Turismo. Is there a higher automotive honor than that?!

WE PARTIED LIKE ROCK STARS!