The Time Attack FoST Goes to the Dragstrip!

So how fast is the Time Attack FoST really? We have been asked this at least 500 times over the course of the past few years, so we finally decided to try her out on the dragstip just to see! Unfortunately, the TAFoST is a purpose built track car, not a drag racing machine, therefore we have to work around some things that make her worse on the stip than even a stock ST (i.e. lack of e-brake makes it harder to do a burnout as well as stage, full road racing cage adds way more weight than a standard drag racing cage would, and an aggressive track alignment actually makes traction worse)

We gave ourselves a small budget of $1200 to work with to transform the FoST from a road racing machine to drag strip beast. We took off the splitter, diffuser, and wing. Then dropped $160 on a set of closeout Tire rack brand 17x8" wheels, and bought a set of M&H Racemaster slicks for a discounted price. While we were at it, we purchased a set of M&H skinnies to go on the back of the car as the only other set of rear wheels we had were 18x9.5's with a 305 Hankook road race tire on them (which we didn't want to have to drag around on the strip) Then we added a Nitrous outlet base Dry spray kit ($350) and mildly re-tuned the car for the spray on a 50 shot.

The first pass of the night was an 11.8 @127.8 with a bad 60ft, but the car felt very very laggy and was falling out of boost on shifts, even with flat foot shifting. We did another pass that wasn't much better and then decided to turn on the nitrous. The next pass was an 11.5@131mph, still not launching the car very hard. The nitrous added a little more oomph, but not enough for us to really notice, however it alleviated the lag in between shifts which is what really helped ET's.

Brian made a few more passes and finally got down the launch and ran an 11.00 @132.5 with a decent 60ft, although the car still slightly bogged on the 1-2 shift. We knew that there was an easy 10 in the car after she bogged between shifts. So we sent Brian back out to run again with a few other small changes. He had a much better launch and 1/8th mile, however MPH dropped down to 129 mph by this point. The DA was dropping throughout the night so we knew something was up. Turns out that that the mount on the hotside charge pipe had broken, was banging around under the car (we had a ton of dents and damage on the pipe), and was contributing to a huge boost leak. We decided to call it a night as we didn't have the tools or the time to fix it before the strip closed for the night.

With a few small changes this car would easily be in the 10's, but I doubt we are going to pursue it much more. This car is a road race car and as mentioned above, we set a budget of $1200 for this entire drag racing project which we were able to stay under. We are very happy with the results!

Some basic specs of the car:
-JST Performance custom tuning of course

-JST Build short block, stock head, stock head studs, stock head gasket (this was actually our first ST engine build and has been going strong for 2 years now at 500whp+)

-Stock transmission with Mfactory LSD

-M&H racemaster slicks

-GTX3071R Gen 2 turbo @ 34lbs of boost

-Radium 4 port aux fuel

-E40 fuel

-Car weighs right at 2850lbs with driver on this setup

-DA was around 2600 on the best run of the night

We just amazed at the performance of this car. We have lovingly called this car the Alpha FOST before, and I think this really proves it. This is by far from what i can tell the fastest Road Racing Focus ST in the country, and now is one of the fastest in a straight line as well with only a few small tweaks. We can literally swap between the drag setup and road race setup in 30 minutes. She is also fresh off of its personal best lap time at Road Atlanta just a couple of months ago!