Perhaps we could have a members gallery for all our cars, ideally with a small area for us to write a blurb about our car and two photo spots for a Before/After. Then, I'd imagine, we could look through those, and nominate the folks we want based on the current state of the car versus the before and the mods done inthe blurb.
This way we needn't know the person to nominate them, and we needn't resort to nominating ourselves.

In addition to the "featured" article, this would be excellent I think. We could use photobucket, or flickr to host the images so your hosting fees don't go up.