Project Muscrate
Return from Purgatory!
Hi everyone and welcome back. Surprise! Muscrate is making an earlier than expected return. In November I announced that Muscrate would be in COLD storage for the winter as I am introducing a new project to the loyal readers of DRO. Well, it’s all true, except the part of the cold storage and it’s not going to be all winter. I couldn’t do it! I have received more private email from readers of this column AFTER I decided to call it quits for a while than I ever did along the journey. It seems there are quite a few people with late model Mustangs that run relatively small tires like Muscrate who have actually learned something from my project. THAT is cool and part of the reason I wanted to write these articles in the first place. Thank you, all six of you! That’s right! TWO more readers! 
It hasn’t really been cold around here yet, which is fine by me! I have raced this Mustang in some sort of “Class Racing” trim since 1993 and along the way have had some pretty good success if I do say so myself. It has always been a Stock Eliminator-legal race car and I have also continued to enter the “Bracket Wars” along the way even garnering two track championships at Cedar Falls Raceway (one with a T-5 manual trans.) and three second place finishes over the years. I have won an IHRA national event, runner-up at
another, won a Div.5 points meet, set the IHRA national record, won eight “class runoffs” in the NHRA and ran a 10-second ET with a 302.
I have also won numerous bracket and Stock / Super Stock races over the years and this car owes me NOTHING! The point of all this bragging is not to show everyone just how cool I really am, but to demonstrate that if you build a quality piece of equipment, not necessarily expensive, and stay on top of your respective combination, there IS potential to pay back every penny of your investment in bracket racing.
Let’s face it, “Class” racing is glorified bracket racing. It is also potentially very expensive. There is a BIG difference between building a bracket car and building a Class car. Even though the majority of eliminations is the same form of dial-in type racing, that is where the similarity ends. You don’t EVER travel 500 miles to a bracket race and by the stroke of bad luck and qualifying have a heads-up race with your opponent first round and get sent home because you got beat the old fashioned way, got your ass kicked! THAT is why Class cars cost so much to build and maintain and what really separates them from Bracket cars.
