It’s been a long year for the Wyoming-based team of Rob Goss and his 2009 Challenger. As there aren’t a lot of performance shops in Wyoming, in the search for more performance the car eventually ended up in the hands of High Horse Performance and Bruce Maichle. The car began life as a Drag Pak Challenger under the ownership of another race, and after purchasing and campaigning the car in that form, it ran a best of 8.80s. 

High Horse subsequently received the car, where it was taken apart and shipped off to Ron Rhodes at Rhodes Custom Auto for a fresh 25.3 chassis upgrade to handle the new engine; a 404 cubic inch GenIII HEMI put together by none other than Tony Bischoff. The engine wears a set of billet ThiTek/High Horse Performance HEMI heads, a Hogan’s fabricated manifold, and is boosted by a ProCharger F-1X-12R — the legal supercharger for Street Outlaw competition.

This past weekend at the NMCA’s event at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois, Goss absolutely wrecked the modern HEMI record, taking the top spot in the ultra-competitive Street Outlaw class with an outstanding 7.07 at 203.34 MPH — a far cry from the 7.80 at 180 we saw him put up in Indianapolis at the NMCA Finals in 2013. At that time, Maichle assured us that the car would be a runner once they sorted out all of the bugs, and this weekend’s performance proved that out. 

In the second round of competition in Street Outlaw against Dragzine founder James Lawrence, Goss was late on the tree and lost, but ran a 7.12 at 198.17 in the process to back up his earlier performance. It’s a hell of a showing from a heck of a team — one that doesn’t know the meaning of the word quit. Various setbacks during the build process were taken in stride as the cost of doing business when you’re the one setting the trend — and Rob Goss and his Challenger are doing exactly that.