Son Kyle, 19, now joins Mullins on the Mustang’s testing 'n' tuning sessions, and his other son David, 22, works in a Birmingham restaurant. Bill lost one of his daughters, Deborah Loggins, 47, about 13 months ago to pneumonia on an Easter Sunday, but he still has daughters Cindy, Sandra and Nancy. He has four great-grand kids and 10 grand kids.
His latest 10.5 trip has so far lasted only a year or two, but already Mullins has not only gotten his feet wet but indeed, his whole body. Make that his mind. 10.5 racing, specifically the class called “Limited Street,” has just about consumed him of late.
His latest ride in a long drag racing career is a 1996 Mustang fitted with a 4.6-liter (281 cubic inch) Ford V-8 that came from the factory with double overhead camshafts that were just about “hell” to degree in, Mullins said. To that engine, he has fitted a Turbonetics turbocharger fired by 114-octane racing gas. The car is painted a non-descript black and fitted with a ladder bar rear end and a PTC (Muscle Shoals, Alabama) Powerglide and matching converter. Like many others, the 'Stang has made a perfect 10.5-class car (so-named because rules dictate the car and others like it must employ 10.5-inch-wide racing tires that must grab traction off a four-tenths Pro tree, with no breakouts).
Mullins was shooting for the 10.5 class, but close friend George Howard, THE George Howard of race promotions and the famous Million Dollar Drag Race, told him his near-
2,600-pound Mustang would fit perfectly in the Limited Street class, which is one of several of the 10.5 persuasions.
“I didn’t build the car for Limited Street. I built it for NMRA. I’d never even run an NMRA race, but I built it for a 10.5 class. Around here, the 10.5 class is pretty much anything with a 10.5 tire. You can have two or three power adders, and I could take Warren Johnson’s engine, put a Kenny Bernstein blower atop it, and if I ran 10.5 tires, I have a 10.5 car. But NMRA rules are a little more strict than that. They only allow one power adder and the engine has to be a certain size and the car must weigh a certain amount and the cubic inches are not over this or that. It’s a little more strict,” he says. “Limited Street” is almost self-descriptive -- cars are limited to a ladder bar rear end and no wheelie bars, and the racer is limited to one power adder. Most others race the 5.0 Fords with a turbo or nitrous or a blower.
Mullins says he hasn’t got his 'Stang straightened out yet. Indeed, he says with a laugh that he “may never get it straightened out. It always takes me a long time, but I haven’t got it straightened out enough to travel to Bradenton, Florida, or Milan, Michigan. The car hasn’t gone very quick or very fast -- yet.” Its best times were set at one weekend in spring, the Outlaw Nationals at George Howard’s Huntsville Dragway in March of this year, a 5.20 elapsed time.
Mullins has friends in high places. Make that EXPERIENCED friends, like Wayne Young of Young’s Performance shop in Decatur, Alabama, and John Mihovetz of Ontario, California, who holds the current NHRA BB/Altered Turbo records at 6.72 and 208.42 mph in his wild ’02 Cougar. Mihovetz’s altered has an engine combo similar to that of Mullins. “I’ve worried the living crap out of them on questions about this. One guy had to take off and go to the hospital for a month because I worried him so much. I’d call Young at 7:45 every morning right on the dot, bothering him with a question or two. He helped me with the FAST system on this car,” he says.
If anyone can figure out how to make a tiny Ford V-8 run quick in a car that weighs nearly as much as a Super Streeter/Hot Rod, it’s Bill Mullins. His start on that nitro motorcycle in the 1950s took cojones and a whole lot of backyard engineering, but it gave him the experience to jump into dragsters, off which he earned his reputation. “That twin-engine bike, two Triumphs on a small percentage of nitro, ran in the 9s at 150 mph. I couldn’t get any traction with it. I’d take off in third and shift into fourth. The biggest tire I could get was something like four inches wide. It helped me later on with my high-gear-only setup,” he says.
