The NMRA’s Street Outlaw class is undergoing a resurgence, and Rhode Island’s Kevin Volk is smack dab in the middle of it with this gorgeous new GT500 Mustang built by Jason Enos, Bill Gilsbach and the fabrication team at Victory Racecraft in Massachusetts.

You may remember Kevin as one half (along with his father, Karl) of the Karl’s East Coast Speed team from when they took their old Shelby into the eight-second zone way back in 2010. “When we left off with the other Shelby, it was fast, but it wasn’t built for a class, or anything other than to say that we had a fast Shelby. Now we decided to build for a class, with a set of rules, and compete against other people instead of just ourselves. With what we have learned from building the other car, we’ve been able to apply those ideas to the new combination in a top-notch car, and we plan to be competitive wherever we race,” says co-owner and driver Kevin.

Victory recently delivered the car to Volk, who spared no expense when putting this wicked machine together. The chassis was a year-and-a-half project, and was designed from the outset to be viable in a number of race classes – NMRA/NMCA Street Outlaw, NMCA Xtreme Street, and even X275 – the class it ends up in will depend upon the car’s performance in testing. “It’s a collaboration between our shop, Karl’s East Coast Speed, and Victory Racecraft. The car started out as a 2010 body-in-white that has been transformed into a 2014 GT500. The 25.3 chassis has been powdercoated and the body was painted – including painted stripes – by Chris and Billy at the Tasca Ford Body Shop. We didn’t cut any corners anywhere,” says Volk.

The stock framerails are still in place in the rear of the car, yet the suspension has been designed to accept both a ladder bar or a four-link to allow the team lots of flexibility. “We built it to work with both. We’ll be running with the four-link initially, but if we ever want to run X275 we can just throw the ladder bars into it. We just have to finish the car up and do some testing to see where we feel we’ll be most competitive. We have certain goals in mind for the car, but we plan on running up front in whatever class we do decide on. The engine is legal for all of those classes, with a wet-sump external oil pump setup so we’re not limited by a dry-sump system, ” Volk explains. 

“We have a 5.8L Modular engine going together for the car that my father Karl is building in-house here at Karl’s – we’ve done a lot of Modular engines over the years, and this engine is the culmination of everything we’ve learned over the years. The engine is being built in house by Karl, but the machine work is being done by Bob Mason of Mason’s Racing Engines here in Rhode Island. We have a Chris Alston’s Chassisworks Components Drive Systems geardrive on it, so we’ll be able to run all of the different Vortech superchargers – the V-27, the YSi, the Xi, and the XB-105. We’re not sure which one we’ll end up with yet,” says Volk.

 The engine is based around a Ford Racing wet-sump engine block out of the catalog that’s been beefed up by a Darton MID sleeve kit. A billet Winberg crankshaft is on hand, and custom connecting rods and pistons are on the way, expected to arrive later this week. The engine wears Fox Lake-ported cylinder heads, Dale Metlika at ProPower spec’d out the Bullet camshafts, and Kevin will tune the F.A.S.T. XFI system with Travis Quillen of Quillen Motorsports. A Turbo400 will reside behind the engine along with a torque converter from Lenny Croteau’s Ultimate Converter Concepts. Quillen also wired the car with a Racepak Smartwire system and V300 datalogger, and according to Volk, the photos simply don’t do the car justice. It has a ton of little tricks, including the fact that the factory Menu button in the center stack controls the different screens on the Racepak dash display. 

“Now that we have the last few pieces of the engine puzzle arriving this week, we have plans to start the car in April, do our testing in May, and then catch up with the NMRA and NMCA in June,” he explains. “Whatever our final testing reveals will determine what class we’ll be racing in, and then we’ll follow either the NMRA or NMCA at that point.”