Small-tire racing has seen tremendous growth over the past decade — not just in the states but around the world — and one of the deepest roots of the small-tire racing tree is the Outlaw 10.5 class, one of the originals that helped start the craze.
You can go to just about any place in the world that has drag strips and honest-to-goodness organized drag racing and chances are you’ll run into some type of 10.5-inch tire racing. Australia, for its part, has a large contingent of these machines running on the big 10.5W’s. Just one such example of the wild small-tire rides “down under” is this big block, twin-turbo, short wheelbase Holden Gemini that runs six-second passes with relative ease.
Variety is the spice that makes Outlaw 10.5 racing so much fun to watch, with a mixture of modern cars and classic muscle squaring off. The power adders this class brings to the table are equally diverse with everything from screw blowers, twin turbos, and nitrous-snorting big blocks in the mix. With the cars running in the low four second range in the 1/8th mile and drivers willing to run them out the back door at some events, Outlaw 10.5 is a true crowd-pleasing class.
The Outlaw 10.5 Gemini in this video is wheeled by Nikki Hepburn and is a handful for sure. The small car is packing a big punch with its 540 cubic inch Big Block Chevrolet that gets fed boost from a pair of Garrett GTX42R snails. The Protrans T400 two-speed and TCE torque converter put the power down to the 10.5 inch hides. In this video from FullBoost, you can see how hairy of a ride this car is as Hepburn does a great job keeping it straight on a string of six-second, 200 mph passes.