06/08/2026
Had fun with the AFR team at in the Stick Shift shootout.
Canada vs USA
Lots of new small changes in the GC8 and we managed to make a couple decent passes before loosing to in the second round after an amateur mistake on my part staging. Regardless, Rich’s 8.6X would have taken us out, and kudos to him for winning the event!
We qualified with the first pass of the new setup being a 9.6@153mph.
We made some small changes, fed some power in to it and broke a front axle on our next pass in 2nd gear!
Thanks to Devan and Austin who helped swap out the axle in the pits quickly before E1, and we relaxed the short track power a little to prevent breakage, and managed to win round one with both Doug (GTO) and I having issues hitting 3rd gear, both of us still clutching every gear and still on synchro transmissions.
Being the only car in the class not a V8, and most of the field running low 9s, we knew it wouldn’t be easy, so we’re happy to make it through the first round.
Our second round matchup was with who I’ve been itching to race. After some pit lane games and laughs, I was hoping to give him a good run and put on a show at least, and loaded a tune in that I expected would be good for close to 160mph. As I staged in, he turned on his second light, and I turned off my second 🤦🏻♂️, thinking I needed to adjust the car I got off launch control, and then the light went yellow and I watched Rich drive off in to the distance… apparently I need to do more heads up racing, as my amateur move proves!
Win or learn, we are happy with the result. We race to learn.
Big thanks to
racing.engines who put together this new short block for me, and it’s worked great so far with a lot of dyno time and one track day.
filling the cylinder head with their D cams, DLC buckets, and extreme springs.
who’s WRX2X plug-in is running everything on here, including our hybrid e-throttle boost control, logging, safeties, wheels speed target based power management, VVT, etc…
for the bad-ass dry sump setup.
Looking forward to applying what we’ve learned and coming out stronger.
