As one of the trendsetters in LSX-style racing, Tom Kempf is constantly improving upon his performances on the dragstrip. Kempf has been racing all over the place lately and recently turned in an awesome 4.31 at nearly 180 MPH during the Outlaw 10.5 Associations’ race at Toronto Motorsports Park in Canada. Kempf rolls the 1320′ in a LaFontaine Performance Center-sponsored Firehawk powered by one of Billy Briggs‘ finest 454-cube LSX engines.

The Michigan resident has the team at Stenod Performance turning up the wick on the Precision Turbo-boosted machine with a F.A.S.T. XFI engine management system and puts the power to the ground through a chassis set up by Keith Engling and the guys at Skinny Kid Race Cars in Michigan. Engling and his team performed a couple of updates after Kempf met an untimely end with the wall late in the 2012 season and destroyed the back half of the car in the process. SKRC installed the four-link rear suspension and floater rearend required to fit the 33×10.5W meats under the rear of the car along with a fresh carbon-fiber nose to help get the car down to Outlaw 10.5 weight. Kempf regularly competes at Milan Dragway‘s Heads-Up events and the LSX Shootout events held in conjunction with the NMCA‘s events at select tracks throughout the country, and is constantly looking for more from his awesome machine.

We profiled Kempf a few months back in this article where he talked about his switch from competing in Drag Radial events to hitting the Outlaw 10.5 circuit, and so far it looks to us like he’s been working hard towards climbing to the top of the heap in that ultra-competitive class.