Mark and Eric Moore just wrapped up a new build with Larry Jeffers Race Cars (LJRC) for no-time and X275 competition, and the classic Mustang already looks set to dominate.

The project was initially supposed to start after the father/son race team won the Radial Tire Racing Association X275 championship in 2017, but the class rules were as such that they didn’t allow for the front suspension that Mark wanted to run.

“The front suspensions were not worth a damn,” said Moore of the classic Mustang’s factory underpinnings. “They wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do, but a few years back, the rule changed to where pre-1978 cars, you can do different things with the front end.”

The build kicked off in July of 2021 with LJRC taking the steel body and starting to create the carbon-fiber doors, deck lid, and front end for the Mustang. Six months later, the Mustang body was complete and work could begin on the rest of the chassis.

Taking advantage of the rule change, Moore went with a bolt-on front suspension from LJRC that utilizes Menscer Motorsports front struts.

Sitting inside the new front suspension is a 440 cubic inch small-block Ford engine built by Hans Fuestel Racing Engines, using a billet Charlie Weston cylinder block and MBE cylinder heads. The powerplant is very similar to the one the Moores run in their current Fox-body Mustang, which powered them to the 2022 RTRA X275 championship, with the big difference being a switch to an F3D-106 ProCharger from the turbocharged combination they run now.

Behind the small-block, the Moores have chosen to go with a three-speed Turbo 400 from ProFormance Racing Transmissions, along with a Neal Chance torque converter.

Tuning of the FuelTech FT600 EFI system is being handled by Hyperaktive Performance Solutions’ Joe Oplawski, who the team has been working with since the beginning of 2022.

“He helped us win the championship,” Moore said. “We went to Illinois after picking it up and tuned it on hub dyno.” While the power numbers are slightly down from the turbo combination, the Mustang will weigh slightly less with the way the rules for the combination are.

“We are going to run no-time stuff until we get it squared away and then jump back into X275,” Moore explained. “We will run the Fox-Body until then. “We will be in Georgia for No Mercy and be there with both cars, but I’m not sure if we’ll run the new car in X275. We are going to change some things, probably break some things, and there will be people complaining about some things. There’s no reason to hurry up when we have another car that’s a top car. We are not going to show up if we don’t have a chance to win.”

Eric Moore will handle the driving duties for both cars.

“I’m pretty excited,” Moore told us. “We’ve been running a turbo combination for years, so it definitely is going to be a new experience for me. “I have certain ways of staging the car that I’m used to, so it’ll be a learning experience, but I’m pretty confident I can do good with it. Hopefully, I can save my ear drums! It’s definitely louder.”