Love me some street stocks.
Photo by Darin McNeal
“Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.” Nothing epitomized that more than street stocks. These were the cars you commuted to work with, picked up your kids with and got groceries with. They just went faster–and with fewer life commitments.
World Challenge. Firestone Firehawk Endurance. Showroom Stock. If those SCCA and IMSA series resonate with you, a smile’s probably growing on your face. I might be grinning, too. I have a couple photos of stocks in my office.
Certainly, street stocks look nowhere as wild as prototypes. No, their performance won’t match a GT4 car. However, there is something exotic about taking a car never intended to go faster than highway speeds and unleashing it do things it wasn’t initially engineered to do.
At The Mitty this year, sanctioned by HSR, organizers brought in a couple dozen street stocks as their feature marque at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. E46 BMWs. Honda Preludes. Porsche 944s. Mazda RX-7s. Heck, even a V12 Jaguar XJS. Sure, these are sporty models, but we’re not talking factory-built machines intended solely for the track. Oftentimes, teams received cars straight from the production line, and it was up to them to make it go fast.
Rules required these race cars to remain relatively true to their stock roots–so much so that if you stripped off all the decals from most street stocks, they’d blend in among the cars in a shopping mall parking lot. No one would probably know. Try doing that with a GT4 car. Sure, the modern GT4 cars use OEM components (insert air quotes), but they’re a far cry from what folks drive on the road.
Photo by Darin McNeal
Perhaps that’s why street stocks captivate us. We’re all car lovers here, right? But we spend most of our time in our cars stuck in traffic, crawling at 5 mph for nearly an hour. I don’t know about you, but I often daydream about going faster, apexing the turns of the Belt Parkway and reaching the finish line first at the Verrazano. Honkkkk!!! Then those dreams dissipate fairly quickly. Jerk. Let me dream in peace. We’re not getting there any faster.
My point is that we all just want to go faster–and our cars can do it. Street stocks prove that. We just need empty road on track. And maybe some setup knowledge. Oh yeah, add some driving talent, too. Minor details. Either way, our cars could do it, and it’s certainly fun seeing our dreams become reality.
Photo by Darin McNeal
Love me some street stocks.
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