The small tire freak show known as Outlaw 10.5 racing has recently seen racers stepping up their game and resetting records on multiple occasions. This resurgence in the class has led to racers pushing their cars even harder and has made Outlaw 10.5 one of the hottest classes out there yet again. John Carinci was the latest to smash the performance boundaries of the 10.5W tire and reset the class record at Orlando Speed World Dragway during the World Street Nationals last weekend with a blistering 3.93-second pass.

Carinci’s 2004 Z06 Corvette was originally built by Joe Peters and has undergone some chassis and turbo plumbing updates at Skinny Kid Race Cars. The team also switched from their big-block Chevy combination to a 521 cubic-inch Xtreme Racing Engines Hemi that features tons of top-end billet bling from Noonan Race Engineering. The boost being fed into the XRE mill comes from a pair of Precision Turbo and Engine 94mm units that are controlled by an AMS 2000 boost controller and Haltech ECU. M&M Transmission provided the TH400 that works with a ProTorque EV1 torque converter to put the power down the Mickey Thompson 10.5W slicks.

According to John’s son James, getting the car to perform at this level has been a team effort.

“It was a combination of things that led to the record pass. The track prep by Wade Rich at Orlando Speed World was amazing, so we were able to throw the power at the car. The other big factor were the great tuning calls by Jason Lee and Patrick Barnhill at PTP Racing. It’s a really a team effort between the tuning and parts selection that led to this tremendous pass.”

Making the change to the XRE powerplant with Mike Janis doing the maintenance has made running such a quick ET possible, but Carinci thinks there’s even more left in the car. “There’s tons left in it, for sure. We’ve been sneaking up on the front half of the track slowly and that’s how we picked up so much. This engine makes so much power and pulls on the back half, on the .93 we went a 1.226 back split,” Carinci explains.

Footage from GRS Motorsports

The 2018 season is going to be very interesting in the Outlaw 10.5 ranks with so many teams getting quicker and faster this year. Chances are that the record will fall again next year and we will see our first pass in the 3.80s by an Outlaw 10.5 team!