It really "died" a couple years ago along with Popular Hot Rodding and the departure of Ed Zinke and the other folks that made it what it was. A few interested and motivated folks with the Motor Trend (previously TEN, Petersen, etc) group pulled a heroic effort to give it a couple years lease on life, but in the end the apathy of the ownership organization took its toll.
When JE decided not to re-up their sponsorship there really was no place left to go. All the other sponsors had been either ignored or milked dry, and with minimal media exposure (lots of video and staff on site, but almost none of their work ever made it out to the world at large) there simply is no real product to sell to the performance manufacturing community that funds this sort of thing.
Misguided rules were contrived to reduce or eliminate the level of creativity that made the event fun to watch and participate in. They "forced" the engines to look the same - single four barrels, basic ignitions, factory components - while the performance market itself had already embraced creative induction and aftermarket parts for decades. This alienated all the manufacturers that sponsored and actually paid for the deal, and made the builds less appealing to the magazine reader who was looking to see stuff that was cool and creative, rather than see the same old deal again and again. The rulesmakers continuously tried to make EMC a multi-class deal without a single "winner" at the end of the week That strategy never worked, but they kept coming up with new secondary classes where nobody entered, and were often either dropped entirely or populated by one or two entries and a couple shills or placeholders to make it look better. Wasted a lot of money.
When they announced last years rules at PRI a few of us in the audience directly told them that somebody like Blair (a couple of us including me specifically mentioned him by name) would simply come in and take it outright. I really think they thought that a small block Chevrolet was going to take it. They did not understand that Blair has pretty much been building that engine to similar rules for his entire life, and he showed them what he could do. The best of the SBC entries was dyno'd at my place (I was surprised that we did that well among those entered), and after discussions with Blair before the contest I knew going in that neither I nor Adney's SBC had anything for him.
I am really going to miss this contest. Its about the only event I could really afford to do from a competitive standpoint and a time management perspective. I made a lot of friends, learned a lot, and all the competitors worked hard to help all of us to get better at what we do. I suppose its time to make a change....
