LEGENDARY PRO STOCK STANDOUT
GREG ANDERSON HAS SEEN A LOT
OF RECENT CHANGES IN HIS CLASS,
WITH THE DAYS OF HOOD SCOOPS
AND CARBURETORS LONG GONE.
PHOTO: MARK J. REBILAS
Charles Carpenter, known as the “Godfather of Pro Mod,” is a legend
in the Pro Mod ranks. As one of the original pioneers in the class,
Carpenter has seen – and done – it all, marveling about the incredible
advances in the class.
The evolution of doorslammer racing has taken on many forms
over the years depending on the class. For your particular class or
area of expertise, what stands out most to you?
Mark Woodruff: I think the evolution of track prep, the rule-makers,
and the guys that are involved in making the rules and trying to keep
parity across different power plants has been huge. I mean, you look at
the different combos that are out there, and if I’m going to look at drag
radial or RvW, or X275 or anything like that, what makes it exciting is
that anything can be competitive there. It’s obvious Stevie Jackson, and
KTR [Killin Time Racing], I mean, they’re bad asses, and it doesn’t matter
what combo you give them.
But to compare it to other doorslammer racing, you look at even when
the hype of Pro Extreme was going on, it was a true blown Hemi, super
lightweight, no rules. That was the combination to go race. RvW could
be nitrous power, it could be a twin-turbo car, small-block or big-block,
it could be a ProCharger car. It’s like where can it go? I think if you have
the right conditions, you have those mineshaft air conditions, you’re going
to see cars go 3.40s.
Greg Anderson: Well, obviously the biggest change that we’ve seen in
the class for all the years that I’ve been involved has been this change to
fuel injection. That was a serious, serious fork in the road for us. Before
that, it was pretty much an all-out assault to try and make more power
with your carburetors and try to make your engine run as high an RPM
as you possibly could and that was the direction that everyone went for
20-30 years, at least, in the class. Any time you gained on making the engine
run a higher RPM, or things like that, you ran better at the racetrack.
So that’s what the goal was and obviously there’s a rulebook, but there
was a lot of room to work and it gave you a lot of latitude to do a lot of
different things to the engines and create different things, and then when
we made the big swap to the fuel injection, it wasn’t only a change away
from carburetors to fuel injection, but it really cut down on a lot of latitude
that you had on what you could do with the engines. They capped
the RPM and they made different rules for this, different rules for that,
different rules of where you had to bring the air in the front of the car.
Everybody had to do it the same. It was a big change. It wasn’t just a fuel
injection change, it was a clamp down on the latitude you had to try and
find horsepower, basically.
So it’s been different the last two or three years, and I guess if you’re
July 2020
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