Bradenton Motorsports Park is the go-to destination for pro and casual-level drag and grudge racing, plus open sessions – and it's also home to one of the stops in the Street Car Takeover calendar.
The good folks over at the racing-focused ImportRace channel on YouTube love these kinds of events – they quickly abandon their usual venue - Island Dragway in Great Meadows, New Jersey - for additional action at major gatherings like TX2K at Texas Motorplex, Race Motive's various events that take place at Maryland International Raceway, and many more.
This time around, they have something cool from Bradenton and the Street Car Takeover, with the video embedded below focusing on the encounter with a thoroughly modified, nitrous-injected Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat muscle car. It not only packs the usual "serious punch, but the addition of nitrous oxide injection promises an explosive performance that could leave the competition in the dust." Well, as always, that remains to be seen; you should always expect the unexpected at the local quarter-mile dragstrip.
The first encounter is with a classic foe – an S550 Ford Mustang GT that doesn't look nearly as menacing as the gray-black-crimson camouflaged Mopar. Appearances can be deceiving, though, because the parachute-equipped Blue Oval is ready to put on a nose-up show and easily leaves the nitrous Mopar behind it, trying to recoup the lost ground. In the end, the difference was subtly in Ford's favor: 9.28s at 149 mph versus 9.36s at 131 mph.
Next up came a quirky Chevrolet Corvette that had its front intake made up to look like a set of steely, razor-sharp teeth. This time around, the Mopar representative put up a much better fight, and everything worked flawlessly in its favor, hence the victory of 8.99s at 152 mph versus 9.15s at 152 mph. After this second encounter of the 'close, but not close enough variety,' the win-to-loss ratio was equal, right?
The tiebreaker came out later at night in the form of a white Fox Body Ford Mustang, and the latter put up a major fight – after some initial whaling, the Fox Body settled in its lane and darted like a rocket across the finish line: 9.54s versus 9.73s. Sorry, Mopar fans, this segment was all for the Blue Oval enthusiasts, even though one of them wasn't the main character!
Soon enough, we're going to see how the latest 'muscle' cars compare – the 800-hp Ford Mustang GTD will probably duke it out in high-profile YouTuber videos with the upcoming 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, and the soon-to-be-released 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona EV. Meanwhile, if you still want to see Challengers, older Mustangs, and front-engined Corvettes, leave it to the aftermarket realm to keep them alive for as long as possible.
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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