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Radial tire racing standout Daniel Pharris is drawing ever-closer to his debut behind the wheel of a Pro Modified car as he took delivery this week of his state-of-the-art, show-quality 2016 Ford Mustang from Larry Jeffers Race Cars in Missouri.
[2]The Sikeston, Missouri native, motivated by the dream of competing on doorslammer racing’s biggest stage, sold his highly-competitive 1995 Mustang Cobra Radial vs The World car last year and placed an order with Jeffers for a no-holds-barred build with a Pro Line Racing Hemi between the fenders that, with premier tuner Josh Ledford calling the shots on, is going to make Pharris an immediate contender.
Teaser shots of the final product have spread across social media over the last couple of weeks, but only a select few have seen it in all its glory. and needless to say, Pharris is over the moon at his new ride.
“It’s just a work of art, it’s unreal. No words can describe it. The detail that [painter] Jeff Hoskins put into it is just incredible.,” Daniel says. “The artists that can make a car look as real as he does are few and far between. You walk up to the front end and it looks like a real set of headlights on it.”
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“I wanted a show-quality racecar, which is kind of unheard-of,” he continues, “because most people build a racecar to race, not to go to car shows, but I’ve always had really nice stuff and that’s something my team and I are known for.”
So beautiful and detailed is it that it gives Daniel the slightest of hesitation to race it — but not nearly enough to actually act upon it.
“It’s like ‘man, I’m not sure if I even want to slide into that thing … I’m afraid I’m going to scratch it.”
With a steady gig behind the wheel of Andrew Alepa’s Corvette in the radial tire realm, Pharris will be focusing his efforts with the new ‘Stang entirely on Pro Modified competition, with an intent on chasing the championship in the NMCA’s 1/8-mile Xtreme Pro Mod category. After taking delivery on Wednesday, the car is in transit to John Homier at Homier Fabrication in Georgia to be wired and prepped for its planned debut at the NMRA/NMCA All-Star Nationals in Atlanta next month.
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“My long-term plan is to run NHRA Pro Modified … I don’t know if I can make that happen this year, but depending on budget, we may try to do it next year. But we’re going to do all of the NMCA races and the Midwest Pro Mod series that Keith Haney put together. My definition of a series is either you run them all, or you don’t run any, so I picked the NMCA because we did so well with them last year, and it works out because you get to drop one race, so I can still show up in Atlanta and run the last five races and have a chance to win that championship,” he says.
Jeffers prepared a complete shock, chassis setup, and weight package for the car to convert it over to radial tire racing, but Daniel says that with his continued driving opportunity with Alepa at all of the major radial races, it would likely be later in the year before he considers going that direction with his own car.
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Ledford, who helped tune Pharris’ Cobra into the low 3.90s on radials and played a key role in EKanoo Racing’s world record successes in Bahrain this winter with a combination very much like the one in Daniel’s Mustang, is onboard for the full haul of races in the NMCA this year, as Daniel shares, “wherever this car goes, Josh goes with it.”