What really is "STOCK"????

[Hellcat Cuda]

I started this thread to get people's impression of what "stock" (for racing) is for these cars. I'm an old coot, use to the days of following (and some participation) in racing vintage cars (my favorite year models being '62 through '71 Mopars). Without a sanctioning body, all you can really do is bracket race. I've always considered NHRA to be the holey grail in sanctioning organizations and I really like and agree with most of the rules they've come up with.

I know many people have said only "pure" stock or "showroom" stock is "stock", and I "get" that. To me though, a race of showroom stock cars would be boring. You might as well watch a bunch of auto journalists racing a bunch of press cars.

NHRA applies the notion that we are RACING these cars and allows racers to get the fastest times out of them, while keeping the cars within certain, established boundries. I mean come on, the 275 tires provided on a Hellcat are not providing ANY traction in an all out effort to see what these engines are capable of. Therefore, 9", full on wrinkle wall racing slicks are allowed and full on, light weight racing wheels are allowed.

You can run any option on the car whether it came on YOUR car or not, as long as it had been an available option. Special note: I whole heartedly agree with this rule and to those owners of "factory single seat" or RSD cars who cry foul to a dealer or owner installed RSD I say, too bad! Even if a car model did not come with a front seat only option, you can remove the rear seat as long as you are doing so to compensate for the weight of a roll bar or cage.

You can lighten the car by removing undercoating and sound deadening, as long as the car is presentable, with factory carpeting and interior panels. You can remove the entire exhaust system and run (edit: long tube) headers too!

Now we get down to the engine and tuning. You can have your engine fully blue printed to factory specs, as long as you don't do things like porting the heads or intake manifold. However, you can run a 3 angle valve job (or probably 5 angle as is common today). You can re-jet your factory carb; recurve your factory distributor and change your dwell and timing however you want it. However, you can't port your carb, but I believe you can remove the choke plate and shaft. You do not need to run an air cleaner, and you can run the air cleaner base as a sort of "velocity stack".

There are many other things allowed, like changing to lighter brakes, torsion bars and shocks from a 6 cyl. version of your car, as long as they are factory components.

I'm really happy that Dodge created the 1320 Scat Pack and got it approved for STOCK class racing. I have not read a rule book in a long while and I'm really curious how NHRA addresses things (for the 1320) like tuning, changing springs, shocks and brakes. Also, 9" wrinkle wall slicks I would presume?

I know there is an organization who races older "stock appearing" cars, right down to the tires, but I know these cars are far from factory stock or showroom stock.

I also have read where there is a somewhat organized race for LX and LC cars at ATCO every year, but I don't know what type of classes or rules are involved and what type of policing / enforcing of these rules and classes takes place.

So there you have it. I'll probably make some of the changes to my Red Eye that are NHRA legal on a 1320, just for the sake of getting better ETs and still being able to claim NHRA STOCK legal. If NHRA allows tuning the ECM, then I'll be in the market for a good tuner too!

What say, y'all???

 

[Mean Cat]

Stock to me is - No tune , as it came from factory , I don't care about wheels or tires for the track.

 

[Magnified]

Stock
View attachment 13314

Not stock
View attachment 13315


Case closed , now go drive your stock car or go race your modified car

You changed the fender badges as well? Any particular reason?

 

[Stormtrooper1320]

I started this thread to get people's impression of what "stock" (for racing) is for these cars. I'm an old coot, use to the days of following (and some participation) in racing vintage cars (my favorite year models being '62 through '71 Mopars). Without a sanctioning body, all you can really do is bracket race. I've always considered NHRA to be the holey grail in sanctioning organizations and I really like and agree with most of the rules they've come up with.

I know many people have said only "pure" stock or "showroom" stock is "stock", and I "get" that. To me though, a race of showroom stock cars would be boring. You might as well watch a bunch of auto journalists racing a bunch of press cars.

NHRA applies the notion that we are RACING these cars and allows racers to get the fastest times out of them, while keeping the cars within certain, established boundries. I mean come on, the 275 tires provided on a Hellcat are not providing ANY traction in an all out effort to see what these engines are capable of. Therefore, 9", full on wrinkle wall racing slicks are allowed and full on, light weight racing wheels are allowed.

You can run any option on the car whether it came on YOUR car or not, as long as it had been an available option. Special note: I whole heartedly agree with this rule and to those owners of "factory single seat" or RSD cars who cry foul to a dealer or owner installed RSD I say, too bad! Even if a car model did not come with a front seat only option, you can remove the rear seat as long as you are doing so to compensate for the weight of a roll bar or cage.

You can lighten the car by removing undercoating and sound deadening, as long as the car is presentable, with factory carpeting and interior panels. You can remove the entire exhaust system and run full length headers too!

Now we get down to the engine and tuning. You can have your engine fully blue printed to factory specs, as long as you don't do things like porting the heads or intake manifold. However, you can run a 3 angle valve job (or probably 5 angle as is common today). You can re-jet your factory carb; recurve your factory distributor and change your dwell and timing however you want it. However, you can't port your carb, but I believe you can remove the choke plate and shaft. You do not need to run an air cleaner, and you can run the air cleaner base as a sort of "velocity stack".

There are many other things allowed, like changing to lighter brakes, torsion bars and shocks from a 6 cyl. version of your car, as long as they are factory components.

I'm really happy that Dodge created the 1320 Scat Pack and got it approved for STOCK class racing. I have not read a rule book in a long while and I'm really curious how NHRA addresses things (for the 1320) like tuning, changing springs, shocks and brakes. Also, 9" wrinkle wall slicks I would presume?

I know there is an organization who races older "stock appearing" cars, right down to the tires, but I know these cars are far from factory stock or showroom stock.

I also have read where there is a somewhat organized race for LX and LC cars at ATCO every year, but I don't know what type of classes or rules are involved and what type of policing / enforcing of these rules and classes takes place.

So there you have it. I'll probably make some of the changes to my Red Eye that are NHRA legal on a 1320, just for the sake of getting better ETs and still being able to claim NHRA STOCK legal. If NHRA allows tuning the ECM, then I'll be in the market for a good tuner too!

What say, y'all???

The events for these cars that you're referring to are the Modern Street Hemi Shootout races. I went to the fall ATCO event in 2019 and it was a blast. I didn't race, but I met a few of the people from the forums there and had a great time. There were many classes and brackets and to me it was all pretty confusing. There were plenty of people working the race to help everyone make sure they were racing at the correct time.
The situation that you're describing above sounds exactly like what was happening when I was running around the streets in the 70's and 80's. The people that used various components from their respective manufacturer all claimed that their cars were "factory" because to them it had a factory p/n and was available at some point in time from the "factory". I can't tell you how many Chevy's I saw with 12 bolts under them that surely didn't come delivered with those 12 bolts. Same thing with 9 inchers for Fords and Dana 60's for the Mopars. I saw this with everything from camshafts, to heads, to intakes and carbs. Nobody cared about what tires and wheels you had on the back because it was expected that you had the best ones you could afford that would give you the most traction.
Plenty of people had their cars stacked with all of the various aftermarket parts, but there were people who loved to claim that their car was all "factory" based on what you said above. Every fast Mopar i knew about had a set of 6 cyl torsion bars stuffed into it. I was easy to go to junk yards back then and pull an 8 3/4 center section from a pickup that was posi and had gears better than the 3.23's that came in a lot of those early muscle Mopars. Guys with 4 spds were swapping gear sets in them for better performance, all under the guise that they were still using a "factory" transmission.
So...for me....people swapping factory parts around into their respective cars doesn't faze me. It's what I grew up with, and years ago the Direct Connection catalog was filled with "factory" parts.

 

[Demon1]

@Hellcat Cuda You are essentially defining what NHRA allows in their Stock racing class. Most of the people on this forum aren't into NHRA type of racing. In fact, most of them are paper racers and don't even go to the track. Of the few that do race, most of them are test and tune types that only chase a number based on their definition of "stock" or modified. When the mention of stock performance comes up it ALWAYS brings out the nay-sayers about what Hellcats, Redeyes or Demons can do under THEIR specific definition of stock. Dodge Garage has it's definition of stock that allows wheel and tire changes, but many on this forum won't even acknowledge that - because their definition is limited to out of the showroom configuration.

 

[SilverBillet]

Stock and original are two different things. Stock class for racing is well explained above but in most non-racers minds, stock means original. To those guys, the question is not whether it is stock but is it all original. To anyone who has experience street racing, stock means something else. I made a lot of money running my “stock” 383 Road Runner on the street in 1970-1972 on G70x14 fiberglas belted street tires against other stock cars who were actually original and just dressed up with “mag” wheels and wide tires. They could have their own expert/mechanic inspect my car and he would swear to it that it was stock and never had a valve cover removed on it. Of course, that was not the case. To me, stock means some exterior mods are allowed and anything that could have been ordered with your car from the dealer can be added or changed even if your car didn’t come that way...as long as you could have ordered it that way, such as 3.09 rear or Summer performance tires. Of course, if I run 11.0’s in a completely original Hellcat Charger with the Summer Pirelli’s on it, nobody will believe it anyways so why does it matter?

 

[Stormtrooper1320]

Love the "super tuning" of stock cars being discussed in the first 20 mins of this video.

Also, the highlighting the value of the driver mod.

This is really making me want another 5.0 5 speed Fox body

 

[motorhead]

This is really making me want another 5.0 5 speed Fox body

In my graduating year in our Year Book I wrote that my "ultimate doom" would be to be stuck driving a 5 litre Mustang. I stand by those words.

 

[Stormtrooper1320]

I my graduating year in our Year Book I wrote that my "ultimate doom" would be to be stuck driving a 5 litre Mustang. I stand by those words.

The last one I had was an '88 LX 5.0 convertible. It came with those horrible 2.7x gears in it. I put a new clutch in, had the 5 spd rebuilt, the rear rebuilt, and the gears changed to 3.55's. That made a nice difference in that cars fun factor. I lived at the beach in California then so a convertible was fun to have.....until some tweeker in my area decided that he just had to cut through 3 convertible tops while breaking into a car that had nothing in it and wasn't locked. He was eventually caught and spent some time in jail. I sold the car after that because the fun factor of having a convertible was gone. If I got another 5.0, it would be a coupe or hatchback.

 

[motorhead]

The last one I had was an '88 LX 5.0 convertible. It came with those horrible 2.7x gears in it. I put a new clutch in, had the 5 spd rebuilt, the rear rebuilt, and the gears changed to 3.55's. That made a nice difference in that cars fun factor. I lived at the beach in California then so a convertible was fun to have.....until some tweeker in my area decided that he just had to cut through 3 convertible tops while breaking into a car that had nothing in it and wasn't locked. He was eventually caught and spent some time in jail. I sold the car after that because the fun factor of having a convertible was gone. If I got another 5.0, it would be a coupe or hatchback.

Growing up, and eventually getting out of high school, we had 5.0s EVERYWHERE! So being over saturated by them was a huge turn-off. Plus, I was raised in a GM household... so there was some bias there as well. By the time I was in my early-20s (in the early 2000s) my MCSS (355, Vortec heads, built 200-4R, 4.56s... eventually nitrous) was curb stomping the 5.0s left, right, and centre - we developed a bit of a reputation at the track (and on the street).

I will say this... a Fox-body 5.0 with Flowmasters was the BEST sounding car on the road.

Oh, I did enjoy driving the new 5.0 I got as a rental in 2012-13 (except that fucking Ford door chime).

 

[Stormtrooper1320]

Growing up, and eventually getting out of high school, we had 5.0s EVERYWHERE! So being over saturated by them was a huge turn-off. Plus, I was raised in a GM household... so there was some bias there as well. By the time I was in my early-20s (in the early 2000s) my MCSS (355, Vortec heads, built 200-4R, 4.56s... eventually nitrous) was curb stomping the 5.0s left, right, and centre - we developed a bit of a reputation at the track (and on the street).

I will say this... a Fox-body 5.0 with Flowmasters was the BEST sounding car on the road.

Oh, I did enjoy driving the new 5.0 I got as a rental in 2012-13 (except that fucking Ford door chime).

Hell....imagine being a Mopar guy during the 80's and early 90's....no new factory high performance cars. 5.0's and IROC's everywhere! I was beating up on them in my big block '74 Cuda until it got run into from behind at a red light and totaled by some drunk "jackwaggon" ....sorry @BULL....just had to steal that from you
Then my choices were narrowed down to 5.0 Fords or IROC Camaros. I chose the 5.0 Ford route for my next many cars. I could not believe how quickly the aftermarket had performance parts available for those cars and how fast they could be pushed to run. If the 'Cuda had not gotten totaled, its days of curb stompin would've been limited as those Fords and Chevy's got faster and faster. And with as cheap as the 5.0 Mustangs were, you could pick them up used for a really good price, make them faster for cheap, and have a lot of fun.
I've got the bug for a 5.0 Mustang.......and watching that video you posted has made me start looking through the Fox body 5.0 ads once again