Four Colorado Buddies Bought a Pile of a Mustang - And Had The Time of Their Lives
Normally if you have drag-and-drive tech guy Keith Turk’s attention, something has gone very wrong. But a pinkish-red ’67 Mustang captured his imagination at Sick Summer earlier this year for all the right reasons.
“Those guys are what racing is all about,” Keith said, pointing towards a group of young men. “They’re just kids in their twenties that got a car, came to the event and made it happen.”
Nick Foss and his cheese hat-wearing companion Zack arrived from Colorado in search of adventure, with a couple of buddies riding shotgun in the Sick Ward.
Photos might not represent exactly what was going on with their car. The paint was from a spray can (“And should have stayed there,” according to Keith), there were trim-less holes on the doors and the rear window seemed to have the rubber-gasket delete option. There were no door cards and parts of the dash were missing. You know, race car stuff — only without the speed.
“It doesn’t have a name yet, but we are working on it,” Nick said. “I had the car for about a year, but never intended on building it up for drag-and-drive. It’s still really not a drag car, it’s just a street car. For me, this was a way to get in the gates and then figure out exactly what I want to do. It’s a pretty basic carbureted 302 set-up. The whole top of the motor was refreshed two weeks before the event to get it ready.”
Like many drag-and-drive entries, the crew were still trying to get the car ‘finished’ right up to tech inspection, and there may have been a few issues.
“A week before Sick Summer, the car wasn’t painted, not together, not running right, and everything like that. It’s missing the window trim and the dash panel, but it’s not too bad. We couldn’t find the trunk latch, so some sticks and zip ties do the trick.”
The team was literally overheard during the week with concern in their voices that they could only open the trunk four more times because they only had four suitable zip ties left.
Nick wasn’t done. “It had a shifter boot, but it kept me from going into second gear, so no more shifter boot. I mean, it needs some little touch-ups, like there’s some paint chipping and none of the body panels are straight, but that’s all stuff we can work on after our first racing week. Other than that it’s fine.”
“Except for the fires,” Cheesehead Zack thoughtfully added. “We are three outta four days for car fires. We found the carb was getting too hot and boiling the fuel. It would backfire, then carb fire. We’ve had two carb fires. Yesterday we had a dash fire — it was just an electrical fire under the dash, that was all.”
“Sure, one little electrical fire, and two little carb fires,” Nick said, nonchalantly. “But we haven’t had a fire today and we’re sure going to try and keep it that way.We haven’t even had to use the fire extinguisher yet, I use my hat.”
Okay, but surely besides that, everything is good — right?
“Well, except for the transmission swap on day zero,” reminded ol’ Cheesehead.
“Oh yeah, there was that,” remembered Nick. “But it was fine because we had a spare in the trunk. Actually, the original transmission is now in the trunk, and the spare is in the car. I had suspected that the transmission was bad before we left Colorado, so I bought a new one. I just didn’t have time to put it in.”
There’s a reason these guys won the Spirit of Sick Summer Award. There were a million reasons they shouldn’t have been at the event, or kept going, but none of them mattered to this group of resilient and happy-go-lucky human beings.
“I’ve been watching (drag-and-drives) on YouTube forever and I thought it sounded like a cool idea,” said Nick. “I heard about Sick Summer and it sounded more laid back, but was still a drag-and-drive. It was more like what I wanted to do, so I signed up. Throughout the week, we’ve been tuning it up, getting it back together, and we made it to the last day, under power.”
The boys improved from a day one 16.299 on only five cylinders to a more representative 15.131. They then added nitrous on the final day and belted out a 14.727. As a bonus they landed first place in the Sick Bullseye comp.
“The engine is probably as good as I can get it right now. I’m already planning the car for next year,” Nick said.
