Nothing pumps a crowd up more at a heads-up race than a tight field with great side-by-side racing (and perhaps some record-betting runs), and the LSX Real Street Class offers that and more. This season in Real Street was arguably the best ever, and the 2014 Chevrolet Performance LSX Shootout had it all with everything from records being reset multiple times to the championship being settled in a head-to-head showdown. With the highest car counts in all of the LSX Series heads-up classes, Real Street is becoming the class to run.
The Real Street class competes at the Chevy High Performance Nationals, the NMCA race at Norwalk, the Holley LS Fest, and the NMCA World Finals in Indy. This year there was great variety in the class, including hird, fourth, and fifth generation F-bodies, Corvettes and even a stick shift car in the mix. At the Chevrolet Performance LSX Shootout, every power adder in the class was able to break into the seven-second zone in what became the quickest, fastest, and certainly closest event of the year.
During the season-ending Chevrolet Performance LSX Shootout at Lucas Oil Raceway, the Real Street action was kicked off with qualifying that had the top four cars in the seven-second zone and the top half the field within a few hundredths of each other. The turbo cars of Paul Falcon, Ray Litz and Jessie Coulter really stepped up at Indy, chasing the nitrous car of Kevin Rounsavall and the blower car of Louie Filippides.
As the racing progressed the season championship came down to a semi-final race between points leader Kevin Rounsavall and Adam Preston, with Preston getting the win. In the final, Preston’s nitrous-huffing C5 fell to Filippides’ boosted fifth-gen as he set the Real Street class record with a blistering 7.84 at 186 mph and became the quickest IRS fifth-gen Camaro in the world.
With all of the power adders getting ever-closer in performance, the action in LSX Real Street will only heat up more in 2015. Next year, will we see an entire field of seven-second rides at the Chevrolet Performance LSX Shootout? Only time will tell!