Crowning The Super Chevy 2008 Car of the Year - Top 10

When you see thousands of cars every year, how do you narrow it down to a Top 10 list? If you're smart, you probably don't. Why are we even attempting to do this? Maybe we're just gluttons for punishment. We know we're going to create controversy. Some will be ticked off. Others will go as far as to insult our mothers. Still, here we are.

Like most ideas that bear fruit on these pages, it came from a bench racing session. We were talking about the great cars we'd seen over the year and things snowballed from there.

Any attempt at compiling such an honor roll requires a set of rules, and the first was, "No vehicle belonging to an advertiser is eligible." The main reason for this is fairly obvious. Any award to such a machine would automatically smell of a sell-out. The readers put their hearts, souls, time, cash, and credit cards into their creations. This would be our way of saying thanks.

Cars had to be Chevy powered. No Northstar V8s, Buick V6 Turbos, etc., but LS power is OK. Selections were not limited to those found at Super Chevy Shows, nor did we exclude trailer queens or drag-only cars.

We also had to put some kind of time limit on this. In the bizarre world of publishing, our first issue of the year has a March cover date, the last February; hence we made those the cut-off dates. The only car not featured previously is this year's winner. Finally, we allowed cars featured in the Super Chevy Special issues eligible (Chevy Classics, Chevelle, and Nova).

Is this the end-all, be-all compilation? Certainly not. There were hundreds of cars we'd have liked to have pointed our cameras at, but for a variety of reasons couldn't. Some had been shot by rival publications, while others were geographically undesirable. Sometimes rain got in the way, some will be shot next year. It happens.

What follows on these pages are the cars 1-9, with the Super Chevy Car of the Year, our 10th pick, following on page 26.