Horse Sense: Two weeks before our photo shoot, our feature car was involved in a two-car crash at Lime Rock, Connecticut. In that short time, Tiger Racing got the car back to Los Angeles and completely rebuilt it. Carol Hollfelder updates a Web site dedicated to the team's progress after every race. Visit www.tiger-racing.com for her driving experiences, general updates, and photos.
If you want that goat-staring-at-a-watch feeling, take a gander at Carol Hollfelder's World Challenge Mustang race car. Slowly smack your lips and grind your molars while contemplating a Mustang with an automatic and manual transmission, but without a torque converter or a shift lever. Figure out how they do it without a clutch pedal. Ponder the fact that there aren't any rods, levers, or cables attached to the throttle body-just wires. See if you can figure out if it's a GT or a Cobra. Stoop down to look up at the independent rear and A-arm front suspensions. Have you ever seen that anywhere before? And what's with that behind-the-steering-wheel horn-ring thing? Once you have that figured out, explain why the single windshield wiper hangs down from the center of the roof and the headlights are yellow.
Chew. Chew. Chew.
Now you know why we looked like goats with a camera and a laptop when we caught up with Paul Brown and Carol at Willow Springs Raceway. The car Paul built and Carol drives is a capti-vating mix of savvy Mustang hot-rodding and factory-backed technology. For not only is there plenty of plain-old racer's art in this exceptionally well-detailed machine, but as we found out, generous helpings of factory-supplied hardware and knowledge are spread throughout. The who, what, and why of these devices and team is a fascinating story.
Atop the transmission sits...
Atop the transmission sits the morass of electromechanical hardware controlling the manumatic T56.
Carol Hollfelder came to Mustangs via horses. An equestrienne, she rode jumpers and hunters from an early age. If it weren't for a street motorcycle accident that broke her back and left her paralyzed from midchest down at just 18 years of age, she might still be competing with 1 hp. Post-accident, her competitive nature turned more mechanized when her father, Tom Hollfelder, who is partners in a telecom testing and manufacturing company, pointed her to the road-racing track where he was already competing.
Eventually, Carol and her father prepped a 355 F1 for the Ferrari Challenge. The senior Hollfelder liked the Ferrari because it already had a paddle-shifted manumatic gearbox, leaving only brake and throttle hand controls to fabricate for Carol. It was while campaigning the Ferrari that Tom, Carol, and Paul Brown crossed paths at the races. Paul and Tom hit it off, and eventually Paul and Carol became an item, one dedicated to getting Carol on the track in a pro series.
Paul was veritably born into the Mustang performance world, and he has made his mark mainly through a long and continuing association with HP Motorsport. Gifted with an inventive mind, he has long been an active Mustang road racer in World Challenge and other series. So, when Paul and Carol got together, it was a given a Mustang race car would result.
Paul didn't build Carol just any Mustang road racer, however. Beginning with a regular late-model GT, Paul, HP Motorsport, Tremec, and many Ford Motor Company engineers have bent to the task of producing a technologically advanced Mustang road racer to compete with the general sophistication allowed in World Challenge. Among other things, it features nearly tube-frame levels of rollcage, subframe connector, and brace construction designed and built at HP Motorsport; a Barts Works/HP Motorsport SLA front and an independent rear suspension designed by Tiger.Racing; a unique Four-Valve engine with numerous custom features including an aftercooled Vortech blower; a Tremec T56 transmission with Ford manumatic shifting; hand controls for all driver inputs; and seemingly endless numbers of custom details such as the wheel hubs, brake details, that funny windshield wiper, and so on. There's not a single significant part that hasn't been modified or replaced.
The closest we've seen other Mustangs come to this car were the two Saleen SRs raced at Le Mans in 1997. Those cars were full of electro-mechanical trickery, but they lacked the manumatic-transmission sophistication of the Brown/Hollfelder machine.