Brett LaSala is done with the FuelTech Radial Outlaws Racing Series. Less than a week after re-setting the Limited Drag Radial class record with a 3.762 and taking the win at Bama Outlaws in Steele, Alabama, the driver of the Coyote-powered Snot Rocket Mustang announced he’s pulling his program from the series – not over the rule change itself, but over how it came down.
The rule change was the opening shot. Within 24 hours of LaSala’s victory over reigning RORS LDR champion Jamie Hancock at Alabama International Dragway, the series technical committee released a sweeping three-part adjustment aimed directly at the Ford Modular combination: an additional 200 pounds of base weight, removal of the intercooler allowance, and removal of the lockup transmission. LaSala put the performance penalty of those changes at two-and-a-half to three tenths – a death sentence for any LDR program trying to run in the 3.80s.
For the record, LaSala wasn’t arguing he didn’t need to be slowed down. He said he did.
“After our performance at Bama Outlaws last weekend, we understood and accepted that a rule adjustment was needed to slow our combo down to the target 3.80-3.85 range where the class lives,” LaSala wrote in his statement. He also pointed out something that has since been corroborated by multiple teams in the pits: that the right-lane clocks at Steele were running at least 0.02 seconds fast, meaning the record-setting 3.762 was actually a 3.78 on a true clock. By his math, the program needed to be slowed by three to five hundredths. Not three-tenths.
Where it went off the rails was in the process. LaSala reached out to the rules committee, and during that conversation, he says committee members admitted they didn’t know the size of the turbos on the car or the actual engine displacement when they handed down the penalty, meaning the rule change was issued without a full understanding of the very combination it was targeting.
Things deteriorated from there. The committee organized a group call with all the series’ racers – LaSala included – to vote on the outcome.
“As you can guess, this did not go well. It turned into a witch hunt,” wrote LaSala.
That was the moment, LaSala says, that decided it for him. The committee has since indicated they’ll walk back the original rule package and replace it with a smaller-turbo spec and additional weight, a more targeted adjustment that LaSala acknowledged would give the Coyote cars a fighting chance. But the damage wasn’t the rule. The damage was the precedent.
“After considering this whole situation, regardless of the rules set, I know that I cannot show up to another race without having to look over my shoulder,” LaSala wrote. “And if we have a good performance, it will be discredited and large adjustments will likely be made based on emotion to put us out of competition.”
The Snot Rocket program, built around a 302-cubic-inch Fast Forward Race Engines Coyote, twin Precision turbos, an M&M transmission, and tuning by Job Spetter at Real Street Performance, has been one of the best stories in small-tire racing over the last two years. LaSala won TX2K four years running in the quarter-mile, ripped off a 5.87 at 242 mph on 275 radials this spring, and won Lights Out 17 in his first real LDR swing earlier this year. He was chasing the 2026 RORS LDR championship. Now he’s chasing something else.
What stings about this one, and what LaSala said clearly in his statement, is that it didn’t have to end this way. He acknowledged there are still racers and people he genuinely respects in the Radial Outlaws Series pits. He called the series something he’d looked up to for years. That’s not a guy who wanted to leave.
Class racing is a trust exercise between a sanctioning body and the racers who show up. The original Coyote rules package – intercooler with methanol, lockup converter, no other boosted combo in the class allowed to run that setup – was always going to draw scrutiny once it started winning. A correction was coming, and it probably needed to come. The question is how it gets done. A rule change inside 24 hours of a win, handed down by a committee that acknowledged it didn’t have the full spec of the car, decided on a group call with the racer’s direct competition in the room; that’s where this one got away from everybody.
LaSala says he’s got a few ideas for what’s next. Whatever it is, it won’t be LDR.
This story was originally published on April 24, 2026.
The post LaSala Walks Away: Snot Rocket Exits Radial Outlaws Over Mid-Season Rule Change first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
