Jimmy Taylor has heard all the critics. At this point, he says they can kiss his 3.38-second time slip.
He has read every nitpick. It wasn’t a national event, the car wasn’t teched, and it was a test session—so it doesn’t count.
Taylor’s answer is simple. He points to the video and the time slip and lets both do the talking.
The twin-turbo Camaro he drives is chasing and catching drag-racing history. So far, Taylor has twice reset the eighth-mile door-car mark with mind-bending runs in the 3.40s and then a 3.387 at 240.29 mph.
The goal line keeps moving forward. Taylor and tuner/engine builder Carl Stevens Jr. are now aiming at an even bolder target: the first sub-five-second quarter-mile pass by a doorslammer.
That’s the arc of a program that refuses to slow down. It began with test-session fireworks at Maryland International Raceway and has accelerated into a full-on assault on the record books.
Stevens built the Camaro and its heart, an Xtreme Racing Engines twin-turbo bullet fed by a pair of Precision turbos. Atomizer fuel injectors keep the methanol flowing while a MoTeC EFI system holds the tune together.
Power goes through a Rossler Transmissions unit and a Neal Chance torque converter. The combination is as violent as it is precise.
Taylor fired his first record shot with a 3.454 at 234.09 mph. Stevens used that data to load “the big-boy tune,” which delivered a 3.430 at 237.09 mph.
That pass featured a .937 60-foot and a 2.380 to the 330-foot mark. The slip screamed that a 3.30-something was there.
Then came the run that silenced the room. He now holds the world’s fastest eighth-mile elapsed time at 3.387, 240.29, backed by a .930 60-foot and a 2.351 to the 330.
For Taylor, the number that made him grin was smaller still. He’s most proud of a .014 reaction time that shows the driver is as locked-in as the tune-up.
Stevens downplays any notion that there’s magic in his laptop. “I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Man, how you make that thing go that fast and this and that?’ I don’t know if I’m the turbo whisperer or not, but I don’t feel like I do anything particularly special,” he said.
“Man, I don’t know if it’s just a combination of being the engine builder and the engine tuner at the same time, I feel like I have a sixth sense in a way,” Stevens added. “So much of the tune up is planning, fueling and stuff like that… and just being able to understand a lot of what’s happening more than just what’s behind the laptop.”
SIDEBAR – HOW THE NEAL CHANCE BILLET CONVERTER PLAYED A ROLE IN THE RECORD
A crucial piece of hardware helped Jimmy Taylor make drag racing history. According to crew chief and engine builder Carl Stevens Jr., the record-shattering 3.38-second eighth-mile pass was made possible in part by a one-of-one billet titanium Neal Chance torque converter.
“To be honest, the converter was everything in making it happen,” Stevens said. “The piece he built us, it’s just wild. It’s one of one. It’s a full billet titanium lock-up converter. The thing’s almost too nice to stick in the car. You look at it, you’re like, ‘Damn, I got to go beat this thing up?’” – READ MORE
Power has never been the problem, he said. “To be honest with you, it’s just kind of hoping everything behind the engine will hold up to the abuse that I’m about to give it.”
Chassis confidence helps him turn the knob. “My dad’s been doing the chassis stuff on all these cars I’ve been tuning really for the past 10 years,” Stevens said. “I know I can just pour whatever I want into it and it’s going to take it go.”
Stevens knows the cockpit, too. He drove seven to eight years ago—Jim Bell’s car, NHRA and Midwest Pro Mod, Northeast Pro Mod—and found success, including the 2018 World Series of Pro Mod.
Walking away from the wheel wasn’t simple. “I’d be lying to you if I told you I didn’t enjoy driving them,” he said. “But it just gets hard sometimes… my mind is always in the mechanical aspect and the electronic aspect of it.”
He eventually embraced the new role. “I enjoy just the tuning aspect now and just being behind it and making it happen,” Stevens said.
The pressure changed—but didn’t diminish. “There’s probably more pressure tuning because you get these customers and they’re wholeheartedly putting all their faith and everything into you,” he said.
The dynamic with Taylor works because both sides lean in. “Yeah, no, Jimmy’s, man, that dude’s a real wheel man,” Stevens said with a laugh. “Sometimes the guy scares me a bit.”
A new problem surfaced: twisting the input shaft nearly off every hit. The fix required an inch-and-a-quarter shaft and an overnight call to Neal Chance’s Marty Chance for matching converter internals.
The parts made it, along with a reality check from Chance. “The converter is either going to get looser, tighter or stay the same,” the text read, Stevens recalled. “Well, geez, Marty. That really helps me plan a tune up.”
They left the tune alone to learn—and stumbled onto a silver lining. The car went 3.47 at 229.92 because it dropped the No. 8 cylinder on the hit, then still ran stout “on just seven cylinders.”
A bad coil was the culprit. “Put a new coil on it… it went 38 at 240,” Stevens said. “That one cylinder was worth nearly a 10th and 11 mile an hour.”
Taylor, for his part, is still processing the scope. “Oh, it still ain’t really set in, man,” he said when asked how it feels to be “the world’s quickest eight mile door slammer racer.”
The noise online has been loud. “We’ve had so much positive and negative feedback on this… it still hasn’t really set in though that we’re the fastest in the whole world,” Taylor said.
He shrugs at the hate. “People on there saying that we didn’t do it in a race and that it’s not a door car,” he said. “What is there to tech? It’s outlaw pro mod. Anything’s legal.”
When the 3.38 flashed, Taylor was busy just keeping it in the groove. “I was having to drive so hard on it because the car went left with me… when it come down, it went hard right with me,” he said.
“I was trying to straighten it up and trying to decide whether I was going to lift or what,” Taylor added. “Then I seen it was going to make it… and I heard Carl screaming in the radio, 3.38, 240 mile an hour.”
The sensation is primal. “Yeah, I mean, it was a ride… it’s like being shot out of a cannon,” he said.
His path here is unconventional. “I’ve only been in a race car for five years,” Taylor said. “I’d never drove a race car until five years ago.”
He started with bracket-car dreams on a cold drive home from an Alabama fishing weekend. “I bought a car on the way home,” he said.
One car became another and then the “Warbird” with friend Jack Green. “Everybody was telling me I couldn’t just start out at 4.70s… my very first pass in a race car was a 4.69,” Taylor said.
He kept moving the bar. “Got bored going 4.70s… started running that 4.40 bad boy stuff… got bored with it,” Taylor said. “You need to go run RVW… we run a 3.54 in RVW.”
No Prep Kings taught him what a big tire can take. “When you’re lined up beside Ryan Martin, and Kye Kelly, and Murder Nova… if you lift, you’re beat,” he said. “It forced me to learn what I could do on a big tire on no prep.”
That experience translated to a prepped track. “You put me on a prep track with it and I can make it hold pretty good,” he said.
The current blue Camaro started as Stevens’ personal project. “He talked to me about driving it and I was like, ‘Man, I want you to sell it to me,’” Taylor said. “We worked out a deal… and it’s worked out good for us.”
Radials? Not for this kind of save-it-twice pass. “Ain’t no way I drove that car like that on Radials,” Taylor said. “They just won’t handle them kind of maneuvers.”
The next stop is bigger and longer. “We’re going to the World Cup,” Taylor said. “We’re going to try to be the first door car to ever run in the fours in a quarter mile, and we’re going to try to put it in the 320s or 250 mile an eighth.”
The critics can keep talking. Taylor and Stevens will keep stacking data, parts, and proof.
And if the past few months are any guide, the next time slip may talk loudest of all.
“We didn’t get lucky,” Taylor said. “We worked for every thousandth.”
