Few cars in the world of small tire drag racing have the history and backstory of Jason Carter’s Malibu. In its latest iteration the car is a twin turbocharged big block Chevy powered monster that runs in the Radial vs The World category.
About 20 years ago this same car was winning races like the World Street Nationals in Orlando with Job Spetter tuning a turbocharged engine under the hood. We’re pretty sure that other than sheet metal, very little exists of the early versions of this thing and we know that the engine program is lightyears more advanced than it ever was back then. But still, the blue Malibu has been a player since Bill Clinton was in office and that is pretty freaking astounding.
If we fast forward to the recent past from those great days in Orlando we’d see a car that while really awesome in every way was not performing up to the level that the team was looking for. Yes, they were a consistent qualifier at Radial vs The World style races but their performances were not putting them on the top tier with guys like Dwayne Mills, Mark Woodruff, Nova Joe Albrecht, and others. They were a good car in a field of great cars. Well, that’s changed.
The team’s program really came together at Tulsa last weekend during the Radial Revenge Tour event with the 380/208mph run you can see below. Team driver Mark Micke is one of the most brilliant automatic transmission guys in the country and we suspect that these guys have been testing and tinkering with stuff to make the Malibu faster and it has finally shown the promise that they wanted.
Yes, there are guys going low, low 3.70s right now but that’s a scant handful and it has only happened a couple of times. The majority of these cars are still mid to upper 3.80s runners so if you can show up with a car that’ll go an .80 you have as excellent a shot as anyone in the world of winning races.
This was a great pass by a team that people love to root for. With the history of the car and the quality of the people involved you can understand why.
