First things First

I think this has been well documented, but let me add my voice of experience.  Racing is expensive!

Even if you are fine with running at the back of the pack, just to be a safe competitor you are looking at a pretty decent ongoing outlay for entry fees and consumables like brake pads, tires and fuel.

Don’t underestimate what it takes to put together a safe race car.

And if you want to run at the front…well it’s pretty much like an arms race…the costs keep going up.

One of the first decisions you need to make when building a club racecar, is in what class(es) are you intending to compete.

For club level racing, NASA (National Auto Sport Association) and SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) are the two most popular organizations that sanction competition.  Both have a wide range of classes and can accommodate almost any car.

A reasonable approach is to start with HPDE events and then move up to Time Trials/Attack formats.  It’s a nice progressive way to learn skills and build the car up as you go without having to have the car completely race ready.

If you don’t already have a donor car available, clearly the next decision is “what car?”

When we decided to convert our 2005 Mustang GT into a club racer, we originally wanted to compete in both SCCA and NASA.   It seemed to us that we had several options that would allow us to track a competitive car in both organizations.

A primary goal was to run the car for 10 years competitively.

After some research, we felt that a good starting point in NASA would be the Camaro Mustang Challenge (CMC) series.  This class promotes largely stock cars with very specific limitations on suspension  and power/weight.

Since our pony kicked out over 265 rwhp stock, we could theoretically compete in the CMC class by restricting horsepower and leaving the suspension largely stock.  Another option was to go in the, at the time, recently introduced CMC-2 class which allowed for higher HP/Torque ratio and some minor modification.

Keeping the car largely stock would also allow fairly easy entry into the American Sedan class in SCCA.

But how competitive would the car be in mostly stock form?

After tracking the car in non-competitive events stock and doing some minor (as allowed within the regulations) modifications, the answer was…not very.   The biggest issue was the suspension.  Poor suspension on a stock mustang?  What a shock, right?

After talking to several people, including pro drivers and performance experts, we realized that it would take a pretty hefty budget to get to the American Iron class and be competitive, but the S197 was already starting to make its mark around racing circles as a platform for road racing.

Since we started the build, the SCCA SEDiv has started to allow American Iron cars in their ITO class so the platform has plenty of options.

In the end, the decision for us came down to “where would we have the most fun?”

Well frankly the car was screaming to be modified to make it more competitive on the track (or was that just the voices in my head?)

Topics: BlueFirePony; Car Build