Housekeeping: Monday to Wednesday on AutoGuide

Things will be a little bit unusual for the next three days at AutoGuide, but I’m hoping you will bear with us as we prepare what I think will be one of the most entertaining and useful reviews we have ever produced.

See, the trouble is that we’re all desperately in love with the car you see above. By now, you’re probably more than familiar with the Scion FR-S, Toyota GT86 and Subaru BRZ. Well, the same goes for us. In fact, Features Editor Sami Haj-Assaad even bought one and uses it as a daily driver year round. Honestly, he made a good choice and I’ve been green with envy ever since.

Having made that clear, one question remains. Is the FR-S really the best performance bargain for under $30,000? As you can probably guess, that question is frequently the subject of frequent discussion around the AutoGuide.com water cooler. So after several spirited debates, we decided to assemble a dream team of cars that with an MSRP at or below $30,000 to decide which car is the best on the street, at a track and as an overall mix of the two.

In order to answer that question, we assembled eight reasonably priced options listed below and aimed at people just like you and me. That is to say, people who will spend hours debating the virtues of owning a Ferrari versus a Lamborghini only to drive home in a 1998 Ford Escort ZX2 covered in bumper stickers from past elections and an interior that reeks of Chinese take-out. At least it’s a manual.

But I digress. Starting today, we’re going on hiatus from the normal content you would find here in order to converge on the AutoGuide.com test track over the next three days with our intrepid camera crew. In the coming weeks, there will be a three-part video series aiming to satisfy a burning curiosity about what really is the best all-around performance car to own for a price that won’t call for a second mortgage.

The news will continue, but at a slower pace. Similarly, we’re aiming to bring you reviews, but in the meantime we’ll be bringing you a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to be on-location with the AutoGuide.com team during such a massive undertaking. We plan to document our work through Storify, so please follow our progress right here and feel free to jump in with any questions and comments that might pop up.