For about four months, Justin Swanstrom didn’t want even to look at his once-pristine orange race car in the family garage at Zephyrhills, Fla. — wouldn’t touch it, didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
 
That’s unusual for the typical teenage boy who gets a driver’s license and can’t wait to spend every free second in a car of any kind. But this teenager, who’s 17 now, had spent plenty of time in race cars, from the moment he outclassed his Jr. Dragster colleagues by speeding 88 mph as 12-year-old.
 

Photos by Rob Cossack

He got spooked by an accident he later said “really wasn’t that bad,” but with guidance from dad Corey Swanstrom he repaired the car, resisted his fears, revisited the scene, and regained his passion.
 
“I ran a 5.17,” he said proudly of his return to the racetrack, “and I’ve been racing ever since.”
 
Today, Swanstrom hardly can stay away from his smokin’-hot silver nitrous-powered “Skywalker” Mustang. And it’s no wonder. In a span of 63 days this year, the sophomore X275 doorslammer-class racer has won four established Southeast events, advanced to another final and semifinal, set a world record and another track elapsed-time mark — and he literally isn’t even comfortable yet in the seat.
 
With his father and Chris Seidle of Seidle Racing Engines tuning the Mustang, nitrous from Induction Solutions, and help also from Robert Coady’s Category 5 Race Cars, Neal Chance Racing Converters, and crew hand / race videographer Brian Geisler, Swanstrom started his second season with a pair of victories in Florida and has taken his act north.
 
He won the Jan. 12 Wild Tomato Nationals at Immokalee Regional Raceway. After setting the eighth-mile track’s E.T. record at 4.86, he beat Eric Leeper in the final.

 Swanstrom scored back-to-back trophies with a Jan. 27 X275 victory at the U.S. Street Nationals at Bradenton Motorsports Park, defeating Scotty Guadagno (a seasoned racer making his X275 debut).

 
He returned to the Florida dragstrip Feb. 17 for Heads Up Madness and lost to Troy Pirez in the final. However, in the second round of eliminations, Swanstrom claimed the small-block X275 E.T. record with a 4.710-second blast at 149.52 mph.
 
Then Swanstrom began his march north with a Feb. 25 performance at South Georgia Motorsports Park at Valdosta in the “Lights Out IV: Unfinished Business” event that rain couldn’t dampen. He reached the final eight in a monster 74-car field (that swelled from the scheduled 32-car grid because of the storm). Along the way, he became the first small-block X275 nitrous racer (in a stock-suspension radial-tire car) to dip below 4.7 seconds with a 4.686 at 150.56 mph in is Round 2 victory against Richard Stanbro. In Round 3 he lost again to Pirez, as he did a wheelstand and had to get out of the throttle.
 
From there, he got hooked on “The House of Hook,” Carolina Dragway. In his first-ever grudge race, the March 9 “March Madness Grudgefest,” he took Skywalker and Fat Boy Racing to the winners circle again. Eight days later, March 17, back at the Jackson, S.C., track, he won the X275 race and went to semifinals in the Outlaw Drag Radial race. He lost to veteran Kevin Fiscus when Skywalker backfired right off the starting line. But he took home a $6,000 payout, not a bad weekend wage for a 17-year-old high-school junior.
 
In his X275 performance spreadsheet, he has figured he ranks sixth or seventh quickest among all racers, including the ones with big blocks, turbos, and superchargers.
 
“I’m still a rookie,” Swanstrom said, although he’s also cutting eyebrow-raising lights (thanks, he said, to video games honing his reaction skills before he got his new practice Christmas Tree).

It’s a huge turnaround from his welcome-to-racing lesson at eighth-mile Lakeland Dragstrip.
 
“I was racing a slower car, and I kicked the tires right off the line and I thought I could pedal it and beat it. The problem is I was watching him and not watching my lane, and by the time I looked back over I was close to the wall. And it shifted into high gear and it spun me out, put me into the wall,” he said of his mishap. “It wasn’t too bad, but I had never experienced that before.”

 
Eventually, he and his father repaired the car and took it back to Lakeland — because Dad said he wasn’t going to any other track but Lakeland until he could conquer his concerns.
 
The younger Swanstrom, who goes by the nickname “Lil Country,” described his emotion as “a little bit afraid. It could have been worse. I had a lot of people tell me, ‘Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that? You should have done this.’ Inside the car, it happened so fast the last thing I thought of was ‘Let me do this. Let me do that.’ I was a little shook up about it. There were times I’d walk outside, open the garage and be ready to go in there and I’d just turn around and walk back out and go inside the house. I didn’t want to look at it.”
 
After his own personal “Father Knows best” episode, Swanstrom is all over his car. He leaves it just long enough to attend his high-school classes. Despite a respectable 3.0 grade-point average, he confessed, “I could have a lot better if I tried.” He admitted he pays more attention to his Mustang than his math, to his set-up than his social studies.

 
“I get so caught up in my race car that I go a couple of nights without doing my homework. My grades will slip real quick, but I bring them back up. There’s times when I have a race one weekend. And Monday night I’ll have to pull the transmission out, change the converter, change the rear gears — and I’m so beat I take a shower and go to bed. My teachers work with me,” he said. “When it comes to my car, I’ll grind on. When it comes to school, I procrastinate. Sometimes it bites me in the butt, and sometimes I come out smelling like a rose.” 
 
Either way, Swanstrom pretty much has aced the confidence test.
 
“Still to this day, every lap I have butterflies, though,” Swanstrom said, recalling that at Carolina Dragway he lifted early in his first two runs until he got a feel for the surface. “I know I’m safe in my race car. I wear every bit of safety equipment that I can. At a race in West Palm Beach, a guy jumped out of his car in flip-flops and swimming trunks. I just can’t see people doing that. You won’t see me doing that.”
 
But he hasn’t forgotten to ask for God’s help. “I say a prayer every time I go down the racetrack. I pray to the Lord that I do good. He gets me through one race at a time.”
 
The next one looks to be the April 26-28 Spring Outlaw Civil Wars at Rockingham, N.C., where he’ll drive “Skywalker” and his dad will premiere another Eric McMillon Star Wars-inspired creation, the blue and white “Yoda.” McMillon’s Axton, Va., Speed 365 shop also has produced the black Mustang “Vader.”
 
Back at Category 5 Race Cars, Skywalker is undergoing some interior redecorating.
 
“I’m just about starting to get comfortable inside the car,” Swanstrom said, “and now we’re changing everything up. I was too tight inside the car. Coady welded a new Funny Car cage to where I can sit back more into the car. Now my legs are a lot more straight and I have a lot more room.”

 
Many kids hit the beaches or travel for spring break fun. Swanstrom spent his Easter break from school at Category 5, working on the cage from morning until late at night. That also represents a dramatic change in Swanstrom’s life.
 
“When I first started racing, I didn’t know nothin’ [mechanical]. I didn’t know nothin’ about a motor, couldn’t tell you anything about a car. I never took the time to actually learn how to do stuff. It didn’t enthuse me,” he said. “Now I can do mostly everything on my car.  I can tear my motors down and put them back together. I can change transmissions and converters. I can do most of the stuff on my own.
 
“Now I love to do what I do. I want to go faster!” Swanstrom said with his youthful impatience. “I went from 5.20 down to 5.03. I’ve gone a 4.68, and I want to go faster.”
 
Swanstrom’s orange car has a happy ending. Corey Swanstrom bought it from Alabama racer and oil-rig worker Jeremy Fowler, who then bought “Skywalker” from McMillon. Fowler then sold Skywalker to the Swanstroms — just like he had the orange nitrous beast. Now the Swanstroms are planning to give Fowler the orange car back. He has been racing it in the X275 class, including one 4.84-second pass.
 
Swanstrom won’t have a chance to whip up on the car that almost robbed him of his drag-racing fulfillment, for Coady will be refitting it to run on the grudge-racing circuit.
 
But that’s okay. That orange car taught him a lesson, and the student was paying keen attention and has put that to successful use.