Test mode or not, the Mustang’s competitiveness has already been established. Early in October, VanMeter and Greathouse broke through with the car’s first event win at the NMRA World Finals at their home track of Beech Bend Raceway Park, near Bowling Green, KY. Then, a couple of weeks later, against the best Outlaw 10.5 teams in the country, they briefly held the top qualifying spot at Orlando’s World Street Finals before eventually slotting into fifth with a 7.063 at 208.57 mph.
“It was a big learning curve,” Greathouse said of his early experiences behind the wheel of the twin-turboed ‘Stang. “It was just a lot simpler before when we were running Super Street. With the kind of power we’re making now it’s just a whole lot different.”
The potent VanMeter-Greathouse pairing came about early in 2004, with VanMeter tiring of driving his own NMRA Super Street Mustang and Greathouse, the 2003 PRO Super Street champion, struggling to finance and run his own racing operation.
“I didn’t enjoy the driving part as much as the tuning and the engineering, making it go faster, and it was hard to do all the work and then the driving at the same time, so I just hooked up with Joel,” VanMeter, a Bowling Green-based road construction contractor, said. “It was an opportunity for him and me to both get what we wanted.”
After campaigning in Super Street for several years, “the fever of just wanting to go faster” prompted VanMeter to have Steve Matukas of Matukas Motorsports in Alvaton, KY, build the new Outlaw 10.5 car. It was to be the first ’05 ‘Stang to hit the dragstrip in 10-wide trim and that was a motivating factor, too. To emphasize the point, VanMeter said he searched “at least six months” to find just the right color, a paint job that appears brown, charcoal grey, or even black depending on the light and angle from which it’s viewed.
“I’m just the type that doesn’t want what everybody else has got,” he explained. “I wanted something unique and I stumbled across this color while driving around just looking in the car lots. It’s a dark stone clearcoat, is what Ford calls it. We’ve received a lot of compliments on the color because it is unique and that’s exactly what we were looking for.”
A chassis builder for 12 years and operator of his own shop for the past eight, Matukas said the Mustang represents one of his first “true 10.5 cars.” He began his task with a stripped-down body in white purchased directly from Ford Motorsports and added a double frame rail, back-half chassis.
“The car is built beyond a Pro Stocker or Pro Mod; it’s top-of-the-line stuff all the way around,” he stated. “It is a 25.2 chassis, which certifies up to 3,200 pounds. The car just scaled out perfectly and we’re running at about 3,020 right now, but it was built light and we’ve got about 150 pounds of ballast in the back end.”
With a 107 and 5/8-inch wheelbase it’s about six inches longer than last year’s Mustang, which aids in top-end stability, Matukas said, though weight transfer on the start may be somewhat diminished by the longer stretch.
“We may be giving up a little bit there, but the way the chassis is designed on this car, it doesn’t seem to be a problem,” he said, adding that Mark Williams also exclusively built a rear floater kit for the car. “It was the first one they had ever produced for this type of racing with the 15-inch beadlocks,” he said.
