Veteran drag racer Tim Matherly won the prestigious NMRA/NMCA Super Bowl at Route 66 Raceway, driving his all-conquering Hooker BlackHeart/DiabloSport '03 Cobra Mustang to one consistent 10-second blast after another. Powered by a factory-sealed Ford Performance crate engine with a stock ECU, Matherly ruled the Coyote Stock class, which was created to even the playing field and make tuning and driving – not dollars spent – the determining factors in racers' success. And as history has shown, when there's a level playing field, Tim Matherly usually comes out on top. "Coyote Stock is really close to Real Street, except for the power-adder part," said Matherly, who won four Real Street championships and never finished lower than second. "I like the competition, and this is turning into a mini-Pro Stock. I'm not old enough [50] to have raced in the early days of Pro Stock, but I sure remember them." Matherly, who has numerous championships in numerous classes for numerous racing associations and is one of the pioneers behind the formation of Coyote Stock, is intrigued by the fact that the revolutionary category is a spec-engine class – even though, by definition, it compromises his greatest strength: engine-building. "There's basically nothing you can do to the engine itself, but all that does is make you find other ways to go fast," said Matherly, who worked with Hooker BlackHeart engineers to develop the high-rpm power that carried him to victory. "Your headers are one area where you can really get an advantage on the competition, and we did. You can also experiment with lubricants and air inlets, play with plug gaps, change suspension settings, and try stuff with the clutch, but it's very minimal. There's where driving has to come in, and that's what I like about Coyote Stock. You've got to be faster than the other guy if you want to get there first." At the Super Bowl showdown just outside Chicago, Matherly wasn't faster than the other guy twice but still got there first both times, taking the semifinals on a holeshot and coming up with another clutch reaction time in the final against Shane Stymiest for a 10.45 to 10.41 holeshot win. "The ol' man's still got it," joked Matherly, who opened a noticeable lead in the final with a great .036 reaction time. "I never saw him, but then I never look. I focus on the end of the race track. Bracket racers look over, I don't." Matherly emphasized that he never could have done it without the backing of wife Lisa, crew chief Jason Sloan, Hooker/BlackHeart, DiabloSport, Ram, Metco Motorsports, Mickey Thompson, UPR Products, Mustang Parts Specialties, and his own one-stop engine shop, MV Performance, which specializes in late-model Ford engines. "They call this an "entry-level heads-up" class," he said, "but 'entry-level' and 'heads-up' don't go in the same sentence. In heads-up racing, you do whatever you have to do to be up front. This is going to be just like Real Street – we started out as a 10-second class and ended up in the 9-teens."