Most people come up to the pits and the first question is, what is that?
You know.
My name is James Meridith, I'm from San Antonio, Texas, this is a 1973 Capri, there aren't
a lot of them floating around and people think that Capris are Mustangs, but that was later.
In 1973, Capri was a European car that was imported by Ford as a Ford Capri, it never
had a Mercury nameplate on it, it was sold by Mercury dealers because they didn't want
Ford dealers selling it and cutting into Pinto sales.
I've had the car for about a year and a half.
What actually happened was I was running NMRA factory stock in a yellow Mustang, it's up
on top of my awning here, you'll see a picture of it, and this motor, I used this and another
motor and kind of switched back and forth between them and we found the gray area and
took advantage of it with this particular motor and NMRA figured out what gray area
we had and decided to make this motor illegal so we won a lot of races, won 2 races in 2014,
won all 6 in 2015, and then after that they decided to make the thing illegal so I had
this motor leftover and a friend of mine, Mike, who actually has that blue Maverick
behind us, that's got a Coyote in it, and he and I, he is from Pennsylvania and he and
I pit together all the time, he's got powerhouse automotive up there.
And I had this motor and an extra transmission and I said well, let's build a car and so
that was kind of the story behind it.
I didn't have any particular affinity to the Capris, there is a lot of guys that love them,
I didn't even think of one to tell you the truth, I was going to put this motor in, my
first thought was a BMW Z3 would be a lot of fun to put it in, but Mike said, don't
put that Ford motor in a BMW, put it in a Ford!
Well, I said there is no such thing as a small lightweight Ford, rear-wheel-drive Ford, and
he said I've got a Capri out behind the shop and my first thought was like everybody else,
the foxbody Capri that came later and I said well I don't want to put it in a foxbody,
everybody is putting Coyotes in foxbodys and he said no this isn't a foxbody, this is a
real Capri, an imported Capri, so I said, oh, that might have some promise.
So anyway, we built the car, of course, we put Holley EFI system in it, put that motor
in it.
We've done a few things to the motor since then since I no longer had to meet class rules
with it anymore.
Yeah, I supported the pistons and done a few things.
Right now I'm running mod muscle, which is the index class, so I can pretty much do anything
I want to do.
Go as fast as you want.
Yep.
The engine looks like it belongs.
It fit pretty well, people think, well that probably was a tough job fitting it in there,
but it wasn't a tough job for me, I just wrote the checks.
Really we didn't have to cut anything out of the engine compartment, that's still the
stock engine compartment.
Those Capris just had a lot of room in them basically.
It looks pretty stock-ish and it usually surprises people, especially if we go out to like an
NHRA event or something where everybody is running small-block Chevys, I launch at higher
RPMs than most of those guys ever see.
So can you tell me a little bit about the Holley EFI, did you do some actual tuning
on that?
Oh yeah, we tune it all the time, we switch back and forth.
When Mike built the car it was on E85 and last year another friend of mine, Daniel from
Triangle Speed Shop was trying to win the championship in NMRA Coyote Modified, they
were having small car counts and they were having odd.
He needed to go after the gal that was leading it, she ultimately ended up winning it, we
didn't get her, but we needed to get an even number of cars so he could try to hit her
in the first round and take her out, so I actually put nitrous on the car, it was legal
for that class, it wasn't fast enough for that class but it was legal for it, so we
put nitrous on the car and I ended up running a few races last year in Coyote modified just
to try to help him out.
To run that we had to put C16 fuel in it so we've run C16, we've run E85, I'm back on
E85 now, so yeah, obviously the flexibility of tuning the Holley system has been pretty
important in that, we use the Holley to control the nitrous as well, the nitrous on it now,
it's just got a little 50 shot on it right now, but you can see, my little sleeper nitrous
going into the air filter there.
It's just a dry shot because with the Holley we don't have to mess around with a wet shot,
you know, we just throw the nitrous on it wherever we want to and let the Holley enrich
the fuel through the injectors.
Right now with E85, we are just about out of injector but we can modify a few fuel system
components and run a bigger shot on it if I wanted to.
I ran a 9.61 yesterday on motor, I've run as fast a 9.45 on motor, and then on nitrous,
a 9.14 or something is the fastest.
You got an automatic?
Yeah, it's got a C4 automatic.
I come here for the NMRA and then having the Intergalactic Ford Fest, I wanted to see who
was here from other galaxies, you know I was curious, I haven't seen any of them yet that
I know of but I've seen a few people here that might be aliens around here, I'm not
sure.