In 2016 Tim Dutton kicked off his heads-up racing career by getting some seat time in his immaculate 1999 Camaro and began shaking the bugs out of the new small-tire car. Now, Dutton is stepping up his program with more motor and a switch to the turbo side of things for a power adder. The car is nearly complete and Dutton plans on making his presence known in X275 at the biggest radial tire races all over the country for the rest of the season.

When Dutton first started frequenting the drag strip it was in the role of crew-person for some friends who ran Top Sportsman and Top Dragster cars. Dutton’s first experience with the small-tire world came when he started helping a local X275 racer and that was enough to get him hooked on radials. “While working with my friend on his nitrous big-block combination I just knew I wanted to run a turbocharged combination, and with the guidance of my friend Paul Thompson, I set out to have my own X275 car built from the ground up,” Dutton says.

The foundation for his X275 ride is a nine-second 1999 Z28 Camaro that had just 40,000 miles on the clock and was still a street car when he started the process of turning it into a full-blown racecar. Mark Markow at Markow Race Cars updated the chassis and added custom suspension parts, along with a Fab 9-inch rearend filled with Strange Engineering parts. The dampening duties on the Camaro are handled by Menscer Motorsports double adjustable shocks at each corner, while a set of Strange Engineering brakes help slow the car down.

Since Dutton felt it was time to step up the performance, he added a 400 cubic-inch small block Chevy to his Camaro that was built by Precision Racing Technologies. A set of Race Flow Development heads suck in all the boost produced by the Honeywell Garrett turbo through the Shearer Fabrications turbo system. Controlling everything is a Holley Dominator EFI, MSD 8, and Grid box that was wired by Troy Baum at Racewires and tuned by Paul Thompson. Putting the power down is a two-speed TH400 and bolt-together torque converter from Mark Micke at M&M Transmission.

“We made the switch to a more powerful engine combination this year in order to really see what potential the car has and to try to be competitive in X275. We were in the 4.70’s last year with the old setup and this one should do much better with the turbo. Our plans for the rest of the year include running locally with the NEX275 series, the Cecil County X275 program, Yellow Bullet Nationals, NMCA Street Outlaw in Indianapolis, No Mercy 8, the World Cup Finals, and finishing the year at the Street Car Super Nationals in Las Vegas,” Dutton says.

Currently, Dutton and his team are working on finishing all the small details on the car and plan on testing before the Yellow Bullet Nationals. They have very high hopes that the car will be able to qualify in the top half of the field and become a major player in the X275 world the last part of this year.

Make sure you follow Dragzine’s coverage of the event to see Dutton’s car make its racing debut in September!