Veteran sand and asphalt drag racer Brian Fitzpatrick may have missed an opportunity to make import drag racing history, but that fact hasn’t diminished in the least the motivation to push his unique combination to unheard-of heights. And the Lake Havasu, Arizona, native isn’t just optimistic, but is supremely confident that he’s right on the doorstep of writing some history of his own in his five-second-capable dragster.

Fitzpatrick, who has ventured from sand drags to the once-fledgling import drag racing scene to NHRA Top Dragster and Competition Eliminator, has spent the last eight years refining his Toyota 2JZ engine combination, enduring “cracked blocks and heads left and right,” as he shared in a 2014 interview in National Dragster, explaining that he was “pushing them to the edge like you wouldn’t believe.” But, as has been displayed throughout the import drag racing community, a lot has changed in eight years, and today, those engine woes are largely a thing of the past, allowing racers like Fitzpatrick to prove to the world — in jaw-dropping fashion — what an inline six-cylinder is truly capable of.

Fitzpatrick and his late father, Ray, entered the import scene in 2008 when they purchased the dragster and 2JZ engines of NHRA import standout Ara Arslanian, campaigning it in the series’ Extreme Dragster class. When the organization folded in 2008, they moved over to the NHRA Lucas Oil series, where Brian competed in Competition Eliminator through the 2014 season. At the time, his combination was producing in excess of 2,000 horsepower with its twin 74mm Garrett turbochargers.

Brian’s father, who tragically passed away in his son’s arms at the NHRA Pacific division event in Las Vegas in the fall of 2012, had made considerable advancements to the engines, adding cylinder head girdles, o-ringed heads, and a sleeved 2JZ block to help improve their longevity and performance ceiling.

In 2010, Fitzpatrick set an import record at the NHRA Winternationals with a 6.22-second lap, but since that time, import-powered doorslammers have far exceeded those numbers, as Bahrain’s EKanoo Racing punched their way into the five-second zone, later to be joined in the fives by Isaias Rojas. A host of other import teams have also surpassed or equaled Fitzpatricks’ number, and that’s given him the competitive fire to amp up his program and recapture his one-time record status.

“We’re going to get it in the fives, for sure,” Fitzpatrick says. “Shane Tecklenburg has been doing the tuning for us, and he was sure it was going to do it at our last event, but we had an injector fail at the eighth-mile and it leaned it out and burned up a hole. So we would’ve had it there, and Shane was upset that it didn’t.”

Fitzpatrick’s dragster has, as he shares, a combination nearly identical to that found in EKanoo’s world-record-holding Toyota’s — including the same tuner (and go-to MoTec EFI system) calling the shots — and with a car some 400 to 500 pounds lighter, he’s obviously excited at the potential.

“They’ve already run 5.77 in a door car. Shane says when we get this thing ironed out, we’ll be running 5.40s and 5.50s when all is said and done,” Brian shares.

Fitzpatricks’ engine has been punched out from its stock 3.0-liter displacement to 3.2, and with a  Sonny Bryant crank, JE Pistons, a Mazworx billet block, and a billet head from Xtreme Cylinder heads, along with other top-notch parts and pieces from top to bottom, keeping it all together is far less of a concern than it was eight years ago. Fitzpatrick has also strapped on one of Garrett’s all-new 98 mm Gen II GTX5533R turbochargers on the car, which he says alone should produce more then 700 additional horsepower.

Fitzpatrick has followed in his father’s footsteps in the engine department, putting to use everything that he gleaned from their years of racing together to tackle the job of building and maintaining the engines in the dragster.

“After my father died a couple of people said they’d do the motors for me and this and that, but it was just never right. My dad had books on everything — he was a machinist, so he’d keep notes and records of everything he did to the engines. He was preparing me for when he passed away. It just go to where I had to do everything myself, because I just couldn’t find anyone to do it,” he says.

Near the end of of his run in Competition Eliminator, Fitzpatrick made the switch over to an automatic transmission and torque converter combination to make the car more consist — a move that ultimately played a part in changing directions with his racing (the other being the mere fact that racing in Comp made his program ‘stale’, as he admittedly held back to keep from hitting his index under the class’ CIC system). With the NHRA’s disallowing the use of nitrous oxide to help spool the turbochargers on the starting line, Fitzpatrick was overheating the converter, leading to a whole new set of problems.

To his knowledge, his dragster is the only car running in the low six-second range with an automatic behind a 2JZ. “It was tough early on, because we didn’t have anyone to fall back on for data on converters and stators or any of that. The only one running really quick with an import was Bruno Massel, Jr., so we teamed up with he and his dad and put a BrunoDrive and a bolt-together billet Neal Chance converter in the car and now it’s more consistent and easier to build boost and stage the car and all.”

With the driveline combination sorted out, Fitzpatrick has been into the .970’s to sixty-feet, 2.65 to the 330-foot mark, and 4-oh’s to the eighth-mile, typically at around 60 pounds of boost. To date, the Lucas Oil-backed dragster has only seen a maximum of 65 pounds boost, which Brian says is well short of the nearly 100 pounds that some of the five-second 2JZ cars are producing at full song on the top end.

“Shane just can’t believe it…he says ‘man, when we turn this thing up, you’re going to go quicker than you’ve ever been.’ He told me he wanted me to click it off early and get used to the speed. At the last race in Fontana, I went a 6.29 at 213 mph, because I shut it own early. And we only had fives hole to the eighth-mile.”

Without an actual dedicated eliminator to campaign the car in anywhere in the country, Fitzpatrick has been running in Top Dragster and in bracket eliminators in order to get runs on quality, raceday-prepped tracks to go after the big numbers. But he — and the Lucas Oil folks — are hoping to see a resurgence in import-powered dragsters, which would provide a much-needed venue to compete heads-up amongst other five-second-capable machines.