Naturally-Aspirated Shootout - Natural Causes

David Stauder
Jacksonville, FL
'06 GT

David Stauder showed up with the other Three-Valve-powered Mustang in our shootout, and shifted his car into Fifth Place. David came the furthest to compete, as he and his white S197 hail from the great state of Florida. Unfortunately, the long trip had its effects on the car, as evidenced by the datalog and the resulting spark-plug damage.

After motoring to an 11.89 at 112 mph, David lit the scoreboards with an 11.94, but was missing a few ticks on the speed charts. Slowly but surely, the car lost more and more mph. When David downloaded the runs, he came to a conclusion. "On the second pass, it went lean at the top end of the track," he says. "The weather at Englishtown caught me off guard. Running on the ragged edge in Florida really takes on a different meaning in New Jersey. When I got home, I went to Tony's place [HP Performance], and we were able to diagnose the problem. First, I had too hot of a plug in the car with the HT2s I was using. Second, we found out that the stock fuel injectors were maxed out. With the tuning software I have, I wasn't able to see what the injector duty cycle was. Both of those things, combined with the ram air on the car, and the engine just wasn't getting enough fuel."

While David was able to stay in the high-11-second zone, he feels that he left a bit on the table. "We changed the injectors to a set of 39-pound pieces, went to Gainesville Raceway a couple of days after the shootout, and went an 11.89 at 114 mph--in worse air, to boot," he says. "If I had the car running properly at Englishtown, there's no doubt I could have run much better.

"The track the day of the shootout was just flat-out awesome. I dropped the clutch at 6,000, and the car just dead hooked."

No matter, David still gave it all he had, and he did quite well in the process.