Horsepower Wars $10K Shootout: The Race

Wow. Just wow.

After ten days of toil and sweat building their cars, the four teams—Team Bigun, Team Boddie, Team Stinky Pinky, and the COMP Cams Dream Team—arrived at Summit Racing Motorsports Park to race during the Shootout at the Summit event in late September. Now it was time to turn their 10 grand investment and trash talk into ETs and miles-per-hour.

When the tire smoke cleared and the sound of big horsepower was silenced, there was one team left standing as the first $10K Drag Shootout champions. We’re not about to tell you who that team is, we will give you a taste of the competition by highlighting each team’s highs and lows.

Race Format
Each team was given a total of five qualifying rounds to dial-in their car. After the five rounds, the teams were set on a Pro-style ladder—in the first round, the Number One qualifier would face the Number four team, while the Number Two and Three qualifiers would face off. The winner of those races would meet up in the final round.

Team Bigun
Team Bigun’s Lyle Barnett set the pace by laying down a 9.23 second/130 MPH pass in the first qualifying round, lifting at half-track to keep the Beer Money ’86 Mustang in one piece.  The turbo wastegate failed on the top end, leading to a spike in boost that reached 30 pounds. The team swapped in a good 66mm wastegate to fix the issue.

But making a full, clean pass proved to be tough. Team Bigun dialed down the horsepower to soften the hit off the line, but the Mustang kept spinning the tires in the remaining four qualifying rounds. Barnett did make a 9.19 second pass in the fourth session, but tire spin remained an issue. Team Bigun ended up qualifying second.

Team Stinky Pinky
Bad luck seemed to have followed ‘Disco’ Dean Kearns and his team from California to Ohio. In round one of qualifying, the Dr. Rod Knocker 1986 Camaro had front suspension issues (bad ball joints as it turned out) and blew the supercharger burst panel, running a 12.29 second /74.1 MPH pass. But things turned around big-time in round two as Kearns ran a 9.58 at an impressive 152.97 MPH.

Then the stars finally aligned. Kearns made a clean 9.12 second/149.9 MPH pass in round three, and became the first team to make an official eight second pass as Dr. Rod Knocker laid down an 8.98 second ET. Happy with that, Team Stinky Pinky sat out the final round of qualifying.

Team Boddie
Team Boddie came to Norwalk under a cloud of uncertainty. They never got to dyno test the G-Boddie 1984 Buick Regal, and the transmission would not go into any of the forward gears. The transmission issue was resolved, but other issues would crop up during qualifying. In round one, suspension issues forced the car went hard right off the starting line, resulting in a 14.12 second/62.8 MPH run. The car spun hard again in round two, this time due to the Regal’s big block Chevy hitting the rev limiter; driver Jay Boddie did step up a little to a 11.42 second ET.

Round three almost ruined the team’s chances of competing. The Regal’s rear suspension tried to remove itself from the car, and the team thrashed all night to completely redo the suspension setup. The hard work paid off as Jay Boddie made a 9.27 second pass in round four. That would be the last full pass for Team Boddie as the Regal had a massive nitrous backfire in round five, putting the team third on the ladder.

Dream Team
Dwayne “Big Daddy” Gutridge and the Dream Team came to Norwalk with a lot of swagger. After the first two rounds of qualifying, that swagger was gone. A tuning issue in round one made the 1990 Mustang sluggish, so Gutridge lifted and coasted to an 11.52 second pass. The team concocted a boost controller for the turbo, and Gutridge improved to a 9.52 second ET. In round three, he launched with the transmission in high gear and slowed way down. Not good for a driver that boasted he would go 8.50s off the trailer.

Gutridge did step way up in round four with a wheelstanding 8.56 second pass. But the car rolled the beams and jumped the tree during staging, so per NHRA rules the run did not count. The The team did make a legit 8.66 second pass in round five, the quickest of qualifying.

Turbo Shenanigans
That last run should have put the Dream Team in the Number One spot instead of Team Stinky Pinky. But those eight second passes raised suspicions. It was discovered that the Dream Team had swapped the car’s 75mm turbo for an 80mm turbo with a billet wheel. While a Horsepower Wars official OK-ed the swap, the other teams found out that the way the team financed the new turbo violated the rules. After some huffing and puffing and threats of boycotting the rest of the race, officials and teams decided that the Dream Team could keep the bigger turbo, but had to add 100 extra pounds of weight as a penalty. That put the team in last place going into eliminations.

And that’s all we’re gonna tell you. You’ll have to visit HorsepowerWars.com to get all of the gory details and find out who is the first $10k Drag Shootout in the entire history of the world.