Thank You Colin Wigle GT/AA

[Bill Harris]

As one of the hopelessly outnumbered blue-oval fans in NHRA racing I would like to acknowledge and thank Colin Wigle for single-handedly taking on the GM juggernaut in GT/AA. His unique '05 Mustang/429SCJ combination is both beautiful and impressively fast. I have no doubt that Colin will continue to refine the combination and will probably be awarded with a HP gift at some point for all his hard work. He should be the poster boy for all those guys out there whose response to those who gripe about every little thing is "go work on your combo."

As someone who runs the 429SCJ engine in stock, and who had looked very seriously at running the engine in SS form, I know all too well what a major effort it has been for Colin to get his car to where it is. He must like to swim against the stream since he started with a body that was not in the classification guide and then went to work on an engine that has not been run in S/S in 20+ years. It took him a long time to get the car in the guide at a realistic shipping weight. Likewise it has taken years to get the S/S HP factor down from 410 to a level that made the R&D effort worthwhile.

The heads on the 429CJ/SCJ engine are extremely scarce and very expensive when you can find them. They were not even on the S/S port volume list until early this year. I had been trying unsucessfully to get the correct port volumes listed for years for my own efforts, even after my stocker heads were CC'ed when I set a record in 2004 it wasn't sufficient. No aluminum heads are approved for the engine (not that we haven't tried). It's Dearborn iron or nothing. Colin had to do every bit of R&D on the heads, from scratch, without official numbers to go by, and no prior R&D to go by. If you have ever seen the hideous exhaust port on these things you know what a major effort it must have been to get it to work worth a damn.

You can't browse through the Callies crank catalog and pick your ultra-lite shaft either. There are NO aftermarket 429 cranks, period. You can use the stock cast crank at nearly 80 lbs or spend a fortune to have an even heavier OEM steel truck crank massively reworked to fit the passenger car block. The NHRA published rotating weight on the 429 is the heaviest in the listings except for some big Chrysler engines. Nothing about building this combination could have been easy.

This post isn't to take away anything from all the other guys who put so much time and effort into THEIR combos, but I think Colin deserves some recognition for being such a maverick (if that word hasn't been worn out by now), keeping a Ford solidly in the game, and keeping the GM guys on their toes.