Ken Jo Kelley in the Show Mod Mustang at Lights Out 9

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know Texas-based racer Ken Jo Kelley both on and off the track. We’ve learned that if Kelley says he going to do something, you can take that to the bank, so when he said he was bringing a badass hotrod to Lights Out 9 back in February to take on the baddest door slammer class in the world, we were sure he would do just that.

And he certainly delivered.

Ken Jo and his crew loaded up this wicked pro mod-style Mustang and rolled east to South Georgia Motorsports Park to take on the baddest of the bad in Radial vs the World, the ultra competitive brainchild of promoter extraordinaire Donald “Duck” Long and the Duck X Productions team.

With practically zero seat time in the car and no time to test the combo before the race, Kelley and company rolled into SGMP with a blank slate and a lot of motivation, along with he “ace in the hole” of the tuning world, Josh “Squatch” Ledford on hand to make the magic happen. To see a brand new car and combo roll out of the trailer and lay down the kind of numbers Kelley ran through the course of the weekend was nothing short of impressive, despite coming up short of his admittedly-lofty goal of winning the event.

This particular pass, which was just the 5th pass on the car in competition, was a solid a-to-b pass that still lit up the scoreboard with an impressive  3.93 at 196 MPH. He would go on to the third round of eliminations where eventual runner up Keith Haney would end his day with a 3.81 at 198 MPH to Ken Jo’s solid-but-losing 3.91 at 198 MPH.

With a relatively soft 1.08 sixty foot on this pass, the numbers back announcer Lee Sebring’s claim that there is more left in the tank. There are several hundredths of a second left in the low end that should translate into at least a tenth up top, putting the car will into the 3.80’s and possibly beyond if Ledford brings in the power harder downtrack.
Will we see Ken Jo back out in RvsW competition this fall at No Mercy 9? We’ll have to wait and see! If so, count on the car to be running even quicker!