K&N Built Mustang Driven To Victory By Ryan Walton in NASA American Iron West
- 7 Nov 2017
For starters, the Mustang was not initially intended to be a race car at all. The original plan was to install an EcoBoost engine tuned to run on E85, keep the car as light as possible, and have a celebrity drive the car from K&N HQ in Riverside, California to the SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. But the challenges were insurmountable, according to K&N R&D Manager Dave Martis. After a year gathering dust, Martis convinced senior management to allow him and his team to build the Mustang into a road racer. Martis spent the next few months collecting all the needed parts, some donated, some purchased. All fabrication and installation work was accomplished by the R&D team. The only work done outside the building was the paint.
Power runs through a Tremec Magnum XL six-speed gearbox and a custom Curry rear housing hung with Cortex linkages. At the front, the stock strut setup was replaced by a Cortex double A-arm set-up. Shocks are from JRi wrapped by Eibach springs. Brakes are Baer monoblocks with Hawk pads. Other K&N components include a K&N HP-1018 oil filter and K&N 81-1001 and 81-1003 fuel filters. In the 2014 season, Walton nearly won the Western States American Iron title in the K&N Mustang, save for a single missed shift that dropped him to second. Walton earned the ride earlier in the season after he’d blown the engine in his own car and was asked by Martis to sub for him on Sunday. When Walton was fastest in Sunday morning practice, Martis, nursing a bad back, decided K&N would be better off with the experienced American Iron racer driving the company’s Mustang.
If you believe in omens, consider that problems started before Walton even arrived at the track, blowing a trailer tire on the tow to Thunderhill. In practice earlier the week prior to the Championships, the car wasn’t working the way that Walton wanted and his results reflected that. Methodically, the K&N team worked to adjust the car to improve its handling through the sections of the course that were causing Walton to lose the most time. Still, while Walton felt the Mustang had been greatly improved, he wasn’t sure it had what it would take to win. “We struggled the whole week,” Walton said about the qualifying races. “I tore a splitter off twice, went off the track a bunch of times. I finished second to Corey Weber in both qualifying races. I thought we had a second-place car and driver after that.”
Then finally fortune smiled on Walton. “Before our race, a car went off track and caught the grass on fire. It delayed our race three hours” he said. A long delay can sometimes unsettle a driver, but not Walton. “In the race, I got into the lead and got through traffic really well and held on to the lead till the end. There were competitors quicker than us but at the end, we got it together when it counted,” Walton said proudly. “I won my first national championship after racing for 15 years,” he added excitedly. Congratulations to Ryan Walton, Dave Martis, and the entire K&N Engineering racing team for your 2017 NASA win. | ||||
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