The Drag Radial world will soon have another competitor added to the fray, as the guys at Fast Lane Turbo in Houston, Texas recently began outing their S197 Mustang, dubbed Project Warhorse, through its paces with some testing hits at Houston Raceway Park.
Fast Lane, which is well know for its accomplishments in the sport of drag racing and for producing some impressive street creations, began with one of the very last 2005-2009 model body-in-whites that Ford produced, and built the car from the ground-up in their shop with the assistance of local chassis tuner John Harrison over the course of the last year.
Said Fast Lane’s Nick Field, “Originally our plan was to build it as an outlaw car, but we decided that the future seems to be in Drag Radial, so we’ve changed it over and we’re going to run it as a Drag Radial car.”
The Warhorse Mustang is powered by a 4.6-liter, four-valve, .030” over, Ford Modular engine, also built entirely by the crew at Fast Lane. The engine is built around an older modular block that’s been rock-blocked, with a factory crank, Wiseco pistons with 11:1 compression, Ford’s “C” modular heads, a COMP camshaft. Feeding the engine is an experimental S550 91mm turbocharger from Borg Warner – producing the 1,000 rear wheel horsepower at 19 pounds of boost. The engine is backed by a Powerglide transmission routed back to a pair of 315 Drag Radial tires.
“The engine might make 1,300 horsepower at the crank, but it’s not going to cut it in Drag Radial. To bed bad in the class, we probably need to make somewhere closer to 1,600. We got the car running and we’re going to shake it down with the combination that we have and then next season, we’ll put a bigger Modular motor in it. We’re trying to stick with that.”
In early shakedown runs with Field at the controls, the car went a best of 5.80 at 127 clicking it off just before the eighth mile marker.
“Some guys told me you better not run that thing all out. It was one of those deals where I popped the brake and the car actually left good and was on a pass – and its been a long time since I’ve been in a car that felt that good – and I thought man, do I really have to click this thing off?” Nick will be the primary driver of the car for the Fast Lane team. Field competed in the Fun Ford Weekend series for a time NMCA Hot Street, before stepping aside from the sport to focus on building the business.
“When you’re trying to run a business that builds hot rods and do your own, you can spend way too much time and money on your own. It’s tough, and it’s a problem that I think a lot of speed shops have. We definitely took our time on this car. I didn’t realize how expensive it is to build a small-tire car like that, and do it the right way. It was amazing to me how quickly the expense got up there for building a brand new car, even with the labor costs of being in-house. We spent $70,000 on a chassis, and it just blew my mind.” Field and crew have high hopes for their venture into the highly competitive world of radial tire racing – an arena which isn’t for the faint of heart or the financially weak.
“I want to go out there and compete against the GM guys and the Houston-area guys that are really fast, and we’ve got some things that we do here that we want to showcase on the car. We deal with a lot of both GM and Ford stuff, and we’ve been fairly well known the last year or so after winning the last couple Camaro shootouts and our participation in the LSX Shootout, and so this is our Modular deal. We want to do something different; more cutting-edge.”