Every spring we find ourselves standing side-by-side with Sharad Raldiris along the retaining wall at Bradenton Motorsports during the NMRA kickoff—the Nitto Tires Spring Break Shootout. Raldiris is a contributor to one of NMRA’s media partners, 5.0 Mustang & Super Fords Magazine, as well as a Social Media representative of UPR Products. His days of standing along the wall as a photographer are numbered as he nears completion of a 1989 Mustang LX aimed for Spring Break Shootout and True Street action. It is a three-year project that has been filled with blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of cash. And trust us, it might look like a radical race car but this is all street as Raldiris tells us he plans on driving to and from Bradenton, no trailer queen here!
Raldiris took his 11-second LX and ripped it apart in search of 8-second glory and it is a journey that has taken the LX from Ohio to all different parts of Florida before making its way back home on the west coast of the peninsula. Rogue Race Cars installed a SFI 25.2 roll cage and a full compliment of UPR suspension products fore and aft. Tig Vision is also credited with performing a great deal of chassis work (including adding mini-tubs) and building the custom headers. A Strange 9-inch housing is filled with all of company’s goodies and an Aeromotive fuel system has been plumbed to feed the supercharged engine. The aggressive stance is enhanced by a set of Holeshot wheels at all four corners.
Under the hood a Mustang Performance Racing (Tim Eichorn) 427ci engine has a Ford Racing engine block, Trick Flow High Port heads, Box intake, and custom camshaft. A cog-driven (50mm cog belt) ProCharger F1R is chilled down thanks to an air-to-air intercooler and two-nozzle Snow Performance methanol injection system. Interestingly, the Snow meth kit is combined with 93 octane fuel as Raldiris’ goal is to run pump gas/meth rather than some fancy high-octane race fuel. The ProCharger is pulley’d to stuff the small-block with 22 psi of boost. A Dynamic C4 transmission with all the goodies and a 4,000-rpm stall TCT converter back the potent street engine. Raldiris has been playing with a stand-alone EFI system for the past week or so working on idling and drivability parameters. The car is also close to being put on the chassis dyno for WOT tuning and then hit the track in search of fast times.
