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Over the weekend, the Bruder brothers — Rich and Nick — lowered their own X275 national record during the Cecil County Dragway’s Outlaw Street Car Shootout with a stout 4.350 at 164.37 mph from their roots-blown, EFI combination. And, not unexpectedly, it didn’t take long for the controversy to begin.
On Tuesday, X275 founder John Sears addressed the Bruders’ latest performance — the second time they’ve set the record this year with their controversial and unique combination that’s only being run by three others in the country — with a rather unprecedented decision: to ban the combination outright, effective with the 2018 racing season. Said Sears:
A collective decision has been made by myself, Donald Long, Dave O’Donnell, Kurt E Johnson, and Gene Nicodemus about the current lack of parity in X275 in regards to the roots blower combo currently fielded in X275 by three teams. As of today weight will be added to bring the combo into line with others in the class. Also, in 2018 it will no longer be allowed in the class. I missed the weight and openly admit to that shortcoming, but I based the weights on other racers’ progress (or lack of progress) which in hindsight was too light. It has proven that it will continue to cause issues with racers, promoters, and sponsors supporting the class.
“We went a .35, but if you look at all the numbers, the nitrous cars have been a 1.48 back split. We went 1.479 on the record pass. How do you go ban a combination that only went a thousandth of a second quicker in the back half?” asked Nick Bruder in response to their decision. “And how do you get rid of a combination that cost that much money? The biggest punch in the gut on this is that the 10-71 blower that we had to have for this class is too small to use in any other class. It’s essentially a tractor pulling blower — that’s what it’s made for. So you take that $40,000-45,000 you invested in the blower, the intake, the hat, the injectors, headers, the camshaft and other changes we had to make in the engine for the blower, along with all the time you put into it that you can’t get back, and you shove it up your ***. You can’t do anything with it.”
“There are way to slow these cars down without costing us a bunch of money,” Nick adds. “Put an overdrive limit on it, or put weight on it. We’re at 2,750 pounds, so there’s plenty of weight to be added to it if you wanted to slow it down. You don’t have to go out and ban the combination. We’ve only won one race with it this season. At every other race we’ve hurt it, so it’s not like we’ve gone out and crushed everyone and won every race. We didn’t go a .30 or a .25 or anything like that. We went a .35. We went a .37 with the turbo car last year. Big-block nitrous and the blower cars have been right there at .37 and .38.”
Nick confirmed that, at least at present, they intend to finish out the season with the blower combination and will evaluate their plans moving forward.
Sears has indicated he will comment further on the matter later this week.