LS Fest Surprise! 4th Gen Camaro Lands Stick Shift GM 7 Second Run
Cleetus McFarland now has Ray Bulach’s 7 second Camaro to contend with.
The battle to get a GM stick shift car into the 7’s has heated to an incredible this summer, with YouTuber Cleetus McFarland being the first to not only break, but to bust down the 7 second barrier with a 7.8 second run. His car of choice was the infamous “Leroy” C5 ‘Vettekart, but with an exterior cage and no body panels on the car, aero was a big limiting factor. Anyone with a slippery GM model could take the title on back-half speed alone.
Enter Ray Bulach‘s 4th generation Camaro at LS Fest East.
Bulach admits that his crew were riding “on cruise control” due to the fact they had one of the fastest stick shift GM cars out there, however, McFarland upped his game considerably this year, and soon eclipsed Bulach’s performance in a big way. This inspired him to find that little bit more speed, and chase that 7 second mark once again. He says, “this year we dropped a bit of weight and went to an aluminum block, and bumped the cubic inches up, we’re at 422 now. It’s still Texas Speed built.”
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All of that work ended up paying off at LS Fest, with a 7.986 second run at Beech Bend Raceway Park, trapping an incredible 185.87 mile per hour trap speed. “It was probably in the shut down area where I realized it was a good pass, because I was on the brakes more than usual,” Bulach said. Compare that trap speed to McFarlands run of 7.824 second run, where he trapped only 176.57. If Bulach’s car can hold more boost, and he thinks it can, his times can come tumbling down.
“We’ve got a big group that are all on the same level and it’s going to be some fun racing to finish out the end of the year,” Bulach notes. Not too many changes are planned for the Camaro. Bulach, however, knows there’s more speed in the car. But for now, he’s going to work with the current setup to squeeze out extra 1/100ths of a second in future runs.
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