05 Mazda 3 vs 97 Ford Mustang

SCC Racing came into the garage with a Mazda 3. Cool little 4 banger. I have no idea what SCC stand for. Anybody else know? These were military guys, or at least two of them were. In the Air Force (Salute!) Trevor Ray and Tyler Ludwig work on the giant C-130 cargo planes that haul troops and equipment. Important work....much more important than drag racing, but that's why we're here. Josh Fann is a Mazda tech that works fulltime on them at the dealership. But, as another competitor told me, techs at the dealer work on fixing things that are broken on a car....the don't necessarily work on making them go faster. But all these guys love cars and working on cars in their spare time.

One thing about these sport compacts is that they all seem to respond well to tuners. I guess the domestics do that too, but the sport compact guys all seem to put more emphasis on tuners - laptops and others.

Of course, they worked on the exhaust. Their baseline time was 13.86. And remember this is on a 1000' track. They would have an almost 2 second head start against the Mustang. I keep wondering how much this exhaust work is going to let them pick up on their time. They finished their mods with an hour and a half left on the clock. Another thing another competitor told me was that $1500 wasn't a lot to spend on an import because the parts are more expensive. It must cost a lot to ship that stuff over here because they bought an exhaust, an intake, a programmer and a shift light on their budget. But their opponent bought the farm.

Everyone on the crew was surprised at how much work Team Blue Collar was planning on doing in the garage. I'm no mechanic, but I understood from the camera men's reaction that changing out the cams on an engine is a job in itself. Blue Collar was not only planning to change the cams, but the intake manifold, new plugs, a new distributor, rocker arms, push rods, a carburetor jet kit and new tires on the back. Whew. Just typing that made me tired.

You can see more about their parts list here.

Blue Collar built this car for the competition. They took the fuel injected engine out of the car and replaced it with a carbureted engine. And that seemed to annoy some of the other competitors. Matt says they didn't read the rules well enough. You can read them yourself here.

One thing I can say....Blue Collar made the biggest mess in the garage. The PIPES garage has never experienced so much fluid on the floor.

I was excited to see this race. By this point, I was totally digging the elimination races.

I don't get why lane choice is such a big deal in drag racing. Anyone want to enlighten me?

Since the race is handicapped, theoretically both cars are even going into the Elimination Race. It's the improvement that counts. SCC Racing picked up .95 seconds. So even though they lost, they were happy.

Blue Collar picked up almost 1.6 seconds and won easy. But in Round 2, the Round 1 Elimination Race time becomes the baseline, and their new time is 10.49. That's fast. How much more can they pick up?

You can check out more about these teams on Squidoo.