When we stopped by Jim Brown’s pit area to chat at the recent X-DRL Gateway Showdown at the Gateway Motorsports Park near St. Louis, the veteran Ford racer told us that, after struggling in recent years, he’d made decisions t turn his program around and that, if his combination stayed together, he’d be hurting some feelings in the NMCA’s Super Street 10.5W ranks later this season. Well, suffice it to say, Brown is already well on his way to backing up his words.

Brown, a local to the Gateway facility, was at the track on Wednesday night for what was likely his final tune-up session before next weekend’s NMRA/NMCA Super Bowl of Street Legal Drag Racing at the Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, when he ripped off a stunning 6.36-second pass at just 211 mph from his ProCharger F3R-136-fed, 550 cubic inch big block -powered Ford Mustang. That lap topped (unofficially, of course) the current class national record of 6.394 set by Mark Micke and officially put the entire Super Street class on notice that Jim Brown is back.

At the X-DRL event, where Brown entered his 10.5W-clad Mustang in the Top Sportsman class in order to get some solid testing runs in under race conditions and with race prep, he clicked off a stellar 4.31 at 174 mph, providing a pretty good indication of what kind of performance the car was capable of.

On the 6.36 lap, Brown was 1.095 to sixty-feet, 4.189 to the eighth-mile at 181.18 mph, and 5.353 to 1,000-feet. With that performance, Brown is now the second quickest centrifugally-supercharged racer in the world, behind only west coast runner Doug Sikora.

During our visit, Brown told us that, after two years of consistent mechanical woes that limited him to just a few brief outings — the last of which came at the NMRA World Finals last fall in Bowling Green — he’d taken the engine building duties into his own hands and was confident that he’d finally turned the corner with his program. A handful of test sessions later, the monster Ford powerplant is still trucking, and Brown, who needless to say has earned the opportunity to run at the head of the class, is making the runs of his life.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be in Joliet next weekend bringing you same day event coverage, where Brown certainly figures to play a role.