Pennsylvania racer and renowned tinkerer Matt Happel doesn’t believe it takes big bucks to go fast in the drag racing game, and he’s out to prove it, one badass, head-turning ‘sleeper’ at a time.

Two years ago, Happel was featured on the digital pages of Dragzine and StangTV with his four-door 1982 Ford Fairmont that he’d equipped with a stock 5.3L LS truck motor, a turbocharger, a 4L80E transmission, and a small nitrous kit, along with a set of Mickey Thompson ET Street tires, which was enough to push his junkyard ride into the nines at over 140 MPH. This, after he would drive the car 70 miles or more each way to the track, rain or shine. 

Well now, two years later, he’s up to the same old tricks with a similar, albeit entirely new Ford Fox-body ride that gets the unexpected attention of everyone that witnesses it — including the competitors in the other lane and even the dumbfounded tech inspectors at tracks all around the Northeast region.

“I focus mostly on the Fox cars, because my friends and I have been playing with the Mustangs for a long time, but I was never a big fan of the Mustang, and because the Fairmont shares a lot of the same parts and such, I just always end up building Fairmonts,” explains Happel. “I’ve been able to find them pretty easily here in Pennsylvania.”

After putting the gold and cream two-tone ’82 into the nines, Happel sold the car to a buyer in Maryland and began scouring the area for his next project. “I don’t have any attachment to motor vehicles, so usually after they go decently fast at the track, someone will offer me some money for them and I’ll sell them,” he told us.

Happel built up a turbocharged late model Chevrolet pickup truck, but soon got the itch to toy with another Fairmont and located another model, this one another cream-colored car listed on Craigslist, carrying an inline six-banger that a college student was commuting to class in that was having head gasket issues, among a host of other mechanical problems. 

“A buddy and I went down and got the car and I drove it home. It smelled of coolant and burning iron all the way home, and we laughed and just kept on driving it, because we knew as soon as we got it in my garage, we were just going to yank the motor and go from there.”

Happel discovered a 1999 4.8L GM motor through a friend that runs a salvage yard, equipped with paper head gaskets, and paired it up with a 76mm turbocharger and a 4L80E transmission out of a 2000 Silverado pickup for the new project. 80 lb. injectors were added to the combination, along with an LS1 intake to allow the engine to fit under the hood. He and his friends also swapped out the 7.5-inch rear end housing with an 8.8 for a little more strength out back, and added a set of slick (that he bought for a whopping $26) and mounted them on the stock 10-hole wheels.

Initially, Happel ran the car on the stock camshaft, and the first time he had it out at the race track, carded an 11.0-second lap at 126 MPH. “We wanted to see what it would do with the stock cam, and then throw a turbo-specific cam in it to see how much it would pick up,” says Happel.

Happel picked up an ISKY Triple 12 camshaft and proceeded to pick up a full 10 miles per hour in the quarter mile — 136 MPH with an elapsed time of 10.72 and a 1.81 short time — without changing anything else. 

“The suspension on the car is completely stock. I used to put footballs in the right rear spring to stop the car from hitting the right side so hard, as Fox bodies tend to do. So this time we put a pair of children’s softballs in the right rear spring — I spent about $6 — to act like a limiter and keep from smashing the right side down so hard. It levels out the back bumper and lets the car put down good power and drive straight down the track.”

While the 10-second run was a certifiable success given the combination for Happel, it caught the ire of the Raceway Park tech officials, who were none pleased by what they saw.

“A lot of the tracks around here know who I am, and they won’t even let me race when I show up at the track — they get pretty pissed off. So I had to drive three hours down to Englishtown to make that 10.72 run, and after I made that first run, they kicked me out. They wouldn’t even give me my time slip — they were all upset,” Happel said with a mischievous laugh. A satisfied albeit dejected Happel then made the long trek home in the rain, having gotten just one run, but shared that “it was funny.”

Looking to up the potency of his epic new sleeper, Happel switched gears to a 5.3L motor with 270,000 miles on it that he’d pulled out of a Chevy Silverado, and took up an offer to try a billet 76mm BorgWarner turbo from Forced Inductions. Knowing the new turbo would be a better fit with the larger displacement 5.3L, the 4.8L was pulled from the car and put into another newly-acquired Fairmont (which just might be featured here down the road). Happel then added a methanol-injection kit to the car, as he’s done with other builds, using windshield washer fluid purchased from AutoZone, with a hole drilled a hole in the bottom of the washer fluid tank, and a feed line plumbed to a pump and ultimately into the intake manifold.

He also added a single Bosch 044 fuel pump and plumbed cheap 3/8-inch, hydraulic hoses and fittings throughout the car. A set of $60 Chinese-made head studs were also purchased and added to the block as a precaution for the boost levels, along with a set of PAC Racing valve springs, and swapped over the ISKY camshaft. A good friend of Happel’s then fabricated up the hot side of the turbo setup for the forward-facing turbo.

For giggles, the Fairmont was tuned up and taken to a nearby chassis dyno, where he says it was clearing 700 horsepower on 17 lbs. of boost on pump gas. “I was pretty impressed with it to say the least. The whole combination was working really good.”

With a mission in mind to go even quicker than before on an even smaller tire than before, Happel purchased a set of 235 drag radials. “I thought it would be funny to go faster on a smaller tire, because people have this idea in their head that you need a gigantic tire to go fast. But I footbrake my car, so I don’t a crazy suspension or tire or anything.”

And what did it all add up to on the track? How about a 9.68 at 145 MPH, recorded at the Cecil County Dragway in Maryland.

The 9.68, 145 MPH Pass At Cecil County

In-Car Cam

“I told them I was only going to make one pass. I’m familiar with how angry my local track gets, and when they asked me [in tech] how quick it was, I said ‘honestly guys, I’m not sure how fast it’s gonna’ go, but it’s be faster than your safety regulations allow,’ so it didn’t really matter. I didn’t have a cage or anything, and I told them they weren’t going to let met race after they saw that one pass.”

Happel was 1.58 to sixty-feet, 6.29 at 115 to half track, and 9.68 out the back, foot-braking. And after his one and only pass, he headed home after a 300-mile round-trip day, in which he got more than 22 miles per gallon on average.

“That car could probably go eights if I just took it to the track and worked on it,” said Happel. “But it’s difficult because I never have any safety equipment,” says Happel.

At the end of the day, he says his projects-on-the-cheap come down to proving a point. 

“So many people spend too much time trying to make everything look too nice and they never get the car done and they lose interest. People also think it’s outrageously expensive to make a junkyard engine go fast. If you read around on forums, everyone’s so quick to suggest that you replace everything in a junkyard LS engine. It kind of makes me angry — why would you tell someone to buy a junkyard motor and spend two grand replacing everything in it. Where’s the cost-effectiveness in that?

“I give all of my information away, even tunes I have on the vehicles, and I just show people that you don’t need a million dollars or to get frustrated all the time to go fast. I love telling people I only spent so much money, I drive to the track, that it’s reliable, and it goes extremely fast.”

And in case you were wondering the total investment in the Fairmont to go 9.68…Happel estimates around $5,000, lock, stock, and barrel.