A set of 80 Mediterranean fire cases is used as an observation database for model evaluation. Simulations are carried out with 4 different front velocity models. The results are compared with several error scoring methods. All simulations are performed as automatic first guesses with no tuning, as an operational use. Regardless of the quality of the input data, it is found that the models can be ranked based on their performance and that the most complex models outperform the more empirical one.