On Saturday September 15th Steeda Auto sports held its 13th annual Steeda Stampede event at our Pompano Beach Headquarters in conjunction with the Fun Ford Weekend at Palm Beach International Raceway. With over 130 cars in attendance and hundreds of people at the event it was once again a huge success with some of the nicest hotrods and greatest enthusiasts in the whole southeast. Thanks to SCT, Tokico, and Nitto for providing great items donated for the raffle which also included Steeda Autosports donated prizes. We had a huge turnout for our annual Frank's Garage sale. With a line around the building many enthusiasts got some great deals on takeoff parts and blemished items. After a great morning at Steeda it was now time to head out to the Fun Ford Race at Palm Beach International Raceway and see what some of these beautiful rides could do at the track!
The highlight of this year's Fun Ford event was the Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords Magazine "Triathlon". This unique event saw Mustang owners put their cars to the test in three distinctly different events:
- Timed Autocross
- Timed Speed Braking Challenge
- Low ET Quarter-Mile Drag Race Pass
For this event, we decided it was appropriate to pull the cover off of one of our older cars, our 2005 "Screaming Yellow" Q650 that served as a mule in past years for testing and developing many of our performance parts for the S197 Mustang. While this car might be over eight years old, we thought it would be appropriate to showcase how an older 4.6L based Mustang GT that we modified back then, can compete effectively and hold its own against even the newest generation Mustangs and other specialty purpose built cars.
The Triathlon's rules required that the same driver must handle the car for each event - so we relied on our own drag racer Scott Boda to pilot the Screaming Yellow Q-650. When the dust settled, Scott took home the overall top honors for his class at the event with a 1st place in the speed braking event, a 1st place finish in the drag race portion, and a close 3rd place showing in the auto cross event. Overall, Scott and our "Screaming Yellow" Q650 were able to bring home the 1st Place Overall Win in the highly competitive Modified Group Class and he did this in a 3800lb street car that is fully optioned out with leather interior and other luxury appointments and with all suspension and engine pieces right out of the Steeda Catalog!
In the timed speed braking challenge, Scott achieved a time of 11.97 seconds to go from a dead stop - accelerating up to 115+ MPH at the 1,000 foot mark, and then stopping in a 20x20 box all on Nitto NT05R drag radial tires and NT01s up front. His performance earned him the best time overall for this portion of the event beating all other competitors. On the Drag Racing portion of the Triathlon, with 3 round robin passes and no cool down he managed a 11.44, 11.42, and a best of 11.32 at over 126 miles per hour. These times were around three quarters of a second better than his closest competitor. And finally in the Triathlon's Auto Cross event, he was able to wrestle this street car to a 3rd place finish, against cars with full roll cages and complete road racing suspension. Not bad for a guy who spends most his time going in a straight line down the quarter mile dragstrip!
Plans are already being made for next year's Steeda Stampede which we are confident will be even bigger and better once again. Keep up with all our upcoming events by sign