It’s been a long, cold winter in the Northeast, with many cities and states setting record snowfall totals along with record temperatures. NMCA N/A 10.5 racer Rick Riccardi has been heating up his program; as soon as the offseason began, he took his machine completely apart in preparation for a trip down to Matt Wirt Racefab Engineering in Chesapeake, Virginia to have a nummber of new upgrades performed in preparation for the 2014 N/A 10.5 season. 

“Basically, Matt started at the front end and ended up at the parachute. We put in new carbon-fiber wheeltubs, an all-new front end, and realigned the entire driveline in the car,” says Riccardi. In addition to the chassis upgrades, Riccardi also had his engine builders, Bob Oster of New Jersey’s B&B Performance Machine, and Dave Jack of Dave Jack Cylinder Heads put their collective heads together to build Riccardi a small-block Ford beast that can’t even be talked about at this time but is sure to perform on the track. His past performance in the class shows that the team has what it takes, and Riccardi is well-known to the other racers in NA 10.5 as being deadly on the tree. Last year the team finished out the season with the ‘murdered-out’ look of black wheels on all four corners, but Riccardi decided to switch back to the polished look to better set off crew chief Dennis Varga’s sweet paint scheme.

Also on tap for the Downs Ford Motorsport team of Riccardi, his wife Jenni, and Varga will be a brand-new race hauler, as their old setup was getting long in the tooth. “We are champing at the bit badly to get out and do some racing! The car should be ready to make some test hits at the NMRA race at Maryland International Raceway, which Downs Ford sponsors, and then we’ll be at the next NMCA event following that at Gateway in St. Louis,” says Riccardi.