By Tom Neal
Bigfoot Trails Basecamp | Independent Adventure Media
I about had a heart attack.
We were at the dragstrip talking with another Sportsman-class racer. Jahanel runs Sportsman, his son runs Super Pro, and somewhere in the conversation he mentioned that they had already spent more than $300,000 on their racing in 2026.
And this was only about halfway through the season.
Three hundred thousand dollars.
On racing.
I just stood there for a second trying to wrap my head around that number.
That's a hell of a lot of money to go drag racing.
But it also says something about this sport. There is always another tenth to find, another piece to replace, another engine to build, another transmission to freshen, another set of tires to burn through. If you have the money and the desire to chase performance, there are plenty of ways to spend it.
Me?
I wasn't looking for 500 horsepower.
I was looking for two tenths.
There is a big difference.
Our 1969 Mustang had been out of competition for about 15 years before my wife, Jahanel, put it back on the dragstrip in 2025. By the time we got into the 2026 season, we'd already learned that getting an old race car back into regular competition isn't one big project. It's a hundred little ones, and every time you fix something, something else gets a vote.
If you've been following the Mustang's comeback, you know we've already been down that road. The car has had new parts, old parts, engine work, failures, missed races, trackside repairs and more than a few moments where we wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. The Mustang Makes a Comeback: 15 Years Later, We're Back at the Dragstrip tells that bigger story.
This particular story is about one of those little projects.
I wanted to find two tenths without spending two thousand dollars.
The Mustang was running a Duraspark ignition, and I started looking at the ignition curve. My baseline was a 12.99-second pass. I wanted the car to be quicker, but I wasn't interested in throwing a pile of money at it just because that's what you can do in drag racing.
I'd rather find out what the car already has in it.
The first thing I changed was the coil. I replaced the stock-style coil with an MSD Blaster 2 ignition coil. There wasn't anything complicated about the swap. I pulled the old coil, installed the new one and hooked everything back up.
The distributor was where I really wanted to experiment.
The mechanical advance was coming in later than I wanted, so I pulled the distributor cap and got into the advance mechanism. I installed a Mr. Gasket 925D distributor advance spring kit, changing the spring combination so the mechanical advance would come in sooner.
The Mustang already had a new cap, rotor and plug wires, so I didn't replace perfectly good parts just to make the parts list longer. Once I had the springs changed, I used a timing light to check what the distributor was actually doing. That's an important part of this kind of work.
You can install springs and make assumptions about what the distributor is doing. You can listen to the engine. You can blip the throttle and convince yourself it sounds better. Or you can put a timing light on it and find out. I'd rather know.
The baseline was 12.99.
After the changes, we got a 12.79.
Two tenths.
That got my attention.
The engine response felt crisper, especially early in the run, but the number I cared about was sitting right there on the timeslip: 12.99 to 12.79.
Now, before somebody on the internet decides I've discovered the secret to free horsepower, there's an important qualification.
I changed two things at the same time—the coil and the distributor advance curve. I didn't perform a controlled test where I ran the new coil with the old springs, then the new springs with the old coil, under identical track and weather conditions. So I can't honestly tell you that the MSD coil was worth two tenths, or that the spring kit was worth two tenths.
What I can tell you is that the combination worked.
We took the car from a 12.99 baseline to a 12.79 pass with a couple of inexpensive ignition changes.
That's the kind of result I like.
Not because two tenths is going to turn an old bracket car into a Pro Stocker. It won't. But bracket racing isn't necessarily about making the biggest possible horsepower number. It's about making the car predictable, repeatable and, when you can manage it, a little quicker.
And sometimes the cheap stuff is worth doing before you start throwing serious money at the engine.
That's especially true with an old race car. You don't always know what every previous owner—or your younger self—did to it. Things get changed. Parts get replaced. Cars sit. Engines get rebuilt. They get rebuilt again. Something that worked perfectly well ten or twenty years ago may not be the best setup for what you're trying to do today.
The Mustang has certainly been through that process.
The engine has been apart. We've changed the top end. We've had a bottom-end problem. We've missed races waiting for parts. We've made changes at the track that probably should have been made in the shop. We've learned a few things the expensive way.
This wasn't one of those times.
This one cost less than $75 and took some time in the garage.
Then the car went 12.79.
Would I do it again? Absolutely.
But the lesson isn't that everybody with a Duraspark ignition needs to go buy the same parts. Your engine, distributor, timing curve, compression, camshaft, fuel system and combination aren't necessarily the same as ours.
The lesson is simpler.
If you're trying to make an old race car quicker, don't automatically assume the answer has to be another thousand-dollar part. Find out what the car is actually doing. Make a change you can understand. Check your work. Take it to the track and see what the timeslip says.
There will always be somebody willing and able to spend serious money chasing another tenth. That's fine. We're just playing a different game. I wanted two tenths. I got them.
And I spent less than $75 finding them.
What I Actually Used
The three products that were actually part of this experiment were the MSD Blaster 2 ignition coil, the Mr. Gasket 925D distributor advance spring kit, and the timing light I used to verify the ignition timing.
That's the entire list.
I'm deliberately not turning this into a catalog of ignition parts. The Mustang already had a new cap, rotor and plug wires, and I didn't replace them for this experiment. The actual work required a box-end wrench for the distributor hold-down and the timing light to check the result.
That's how I want the product links on Bigfoot Trails Basecamp to work. If I tell you about a part here, it's because it was actually part of the story—not because I found another product to put in front of you.
The bigger story is still the Mustang itself, and this was just one chapter in getting it back where it belongs.
[Read: The Mustang Makes a Comeback: 15 Years Later, We're Back at the Dragstrip]
We're still chasing consistency. We're still making changes. And I'm sure the Mustang will find another way to spend our money before we're done.
That's racing.
But for one afternoon, the answer was pretty damn simple.
A couple of parts.
A wrench.
A timing light.
And two tenths.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Neal is the creator of Bigfoot Trails Basecamp, an independent adventure media project built around real-world experience, exploration, preparedness, vehicles, motorcycles, racing, and the occasional project that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Tom writes from a working basecamp in Washington State, where the projects are real, the lessons are usually earned the hard way, and nothing gets called an adventure until somebody has actually gone somewhere.
Bigfoot Trails Basecamp | Independent Adventure Media
Adventure isn't about expecting things to go wrong. It's about being ready when they do.
