Despite the encouraging early results, Pilcher isn’t sure he’ll get a second “Chemi” from Leonard, at least not this year. Instead, he’s considering adding a blown combination in order to be more competitive with the heavy hitters in Outlaw Pro Mod, especially on marginal tracks.

“You always want to go faster, that’s the name of the game. You don’t want to ever fall behind and it’s got to the point now where the blower technology has been around for so many years it’s pretty easy to obtain the information to go fast,” he says. “You take a nitrous motor and there are only a handful of people on the planet who can really tell you what a tune-up will or will not do.

“The blower cars seem to have a little advantage because, unlike a nitrous motor, they build horsepower progressively and it gets greater and greater as they turn the rpms, whereas with the nitrous car when we let go of the button that’s a click of horsepower and when the second stage comes on that’s another click that hits the tire real hard,” he explains. “So, we’re looking into trying a blower motor out. More than likely we’ll have two cars, one nitrous, one blower.”

This car is probably destined for a new look this summer when a blower will be sticking up through its hood.

The plan right now calls for transforming his current black beauty into a supercharged ride and switching the new Sonny’s powerplant over to his older white car because with a four-inch shorter wheelbase it’s better suited to nitrous power, but Pilcher says mid-summer is the earliest the change is likely to happen.

Regardless, whenever the two cars are re-debuted they will each sport new paint jobs by Mark and Jimmy Lolley, and graphics by Brian Wiggins. “The idea is for the white car to look like it’s being peeled out of a black paint job and for the black car to be peeled out of a white one,” Pilcher explains. “They’re going to look pretty cool. I think people are going to like them.”

In its racing debut at the ADRL season opener in February at Hattiesburg, MS, Sonny Leonard’s new nitrous-boosted “Next-Generation” hemi-headed engine powered Pilcher to a final-round win over Rickie Smith.