bestracing
09-17-2007, 08:56 AM
Congrats to the guys at MD, your in the newspaper again :bigthumb
Link---> http://news.nky.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20070917/NEWS0103/709170392
SOUTHGATE - The expansive building that houses the Modular Depot Performance Shop and Dyno Center was once a used car dealership and body shop owned by Champion Dealer Group.
A walk around the showroom gives visitors the chance to get an up-close look at an Indy-style race car, touch a sleek Ford Mustang FR500C and read about the Champion Motorsports road-racing team and Modular Depot's drag racing expertise.
If that isn't enough to get a muscle-car lover's blood racing, the ear drum assault of a dragster producing enough horsepower on the nearby dynamometer to rattle ceiling tiles loose should do the trick.
"It's not a whole lot fancier than your average shop," said Greg Brown, shop manager at Modular Depot and a veteran road-racing driver.
"It's what we work on and what we do with it."
Modular Depot started as a Web site created by Ken Bjonnes and Brandon Alsept in 2003, and it quickly gained a reputation as a top technical site for Ford's modular engine platform.
The company merged with Champion Motorsports - Champion Dealer Group president and CEO Brad Lehmann owns the team - and moved from Evendale to its new location at 2350 Alexandria Pike last fall.
On a recent weekday, a half-dozen Mustangs in various stages of tuning and modification were either parked or up on lifts inside the garage.
"If you look around, the license plates of the cars in here, most of them are from two-plus hours away," Bjonnes, 33, said. "We've just got a really good national reputation, mostly due to the Web site and our racing in the national series.' People seek us out because we're experts in the modular engine.
"We're really operating on a different level. Most shops that do the same thing - either they have a dyno and they specialize in tuning or they only sell parts but don't install them. We do everything."
The Modular Depot was preparing the Champion Motorsports-owned Mustang for Sunday's National Auto Sport Association Championships at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.
"Beside the business aspect of it, everybody that works here is huge into racing," Bjonnes said. "I'm huge into drag racing. Everybody that works in the shop is somehow involved on the racing side. We're not just a bunch of mechanics."
Champion Motorsports competed in seven of 10 Grand Am Cup races last season and has participated in the Grand Am Koni Challenge on a limited basis this season.
Last month at Mid-Ohio, driving the Mustang when it was set up to Grand American Road Racing specifications, Brown won the American Iron Extreme class.
Brown, 34, won the Ohio-Indiana region American Iron championship in 2004 and its American Iron Extreme championship in 2005 before selling his excavating business and joining Champion Motorsports in 2006.
"I'm hoping we can go to nationals and it turns into us running more of the NASA events next year," Brown said.
"Because that's where we're going to get customers for the business. The Grand Am racing, it kind of legitimizes our business a little bit but, really, the NASA events are where we're going to pull those customers from - at least from the road racing scene."
Link---> http://news.nky.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20070917/NEWS0103/709170392
SOUTHGATE - The expansive building that houses the Modular Depot Performance Shop and Dyno Center was once a used car dealership and body shop owned by Champion Dealer Group.
A walk around the showroom gives visitors the chance to get an up-close look at an Indy-style race car, touch a sleek Ford Mustang FR500C and read about the Champion Motorsports road-racing team and Modular Depot's drag racing expertise.
If that isn't enough to get a muscle-car lover's blood racing, the ear drum assault of a dragster producing enough horsepower on the nearby dynamometer to rattle ceiling tiles loose should do the trick.
"It's not a whole lot fancier than your average shop," said Greg Brown, shop manager at Modular Depot and a veteran road-racing driver.
"It's what we work on and what we do with it."
Modular Depot started as a Web site created by Ken Bjonnes and Brandon Alsept in 2003, and it quickly gained a reputation as a top technical site for Ford's modular engine platform.
The company merged with Champion Motorsports - Champion Dealer Group president and CEO Brad Lehmann owns the team - and moved from Evendale to its new location at 2350 Alexandria Pike last fall.
On a recent weekday, a half-dozen Mustangs in various stages of tuning and modification were either parked or up on lifts inside the garage.
"If you look around, the license plates of the cars in here, most of them are from two-plus hours away," Bjonnes, 33, said. "We've just got a really good national reputation, mostly due to the Web site and our racing in the national series.' People seek us out because we're experts in the modular engine.
"We're really operating on a different level. Most shops that do the same thing - either they have a dyno and they specialize in tuning or they only sell parts but don't install them. We do everything."
The Modular Depot was preparing the Champion Motorsports-owned Mustang for Sunday's National Auto Sport Association Championships at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.
"Beside the business aspect of it, everybody that works here is huge into racing," Bjonnes said. "I'm huge into drag racing. Everybody that works in the shop is somehow involved on the racing side. We're not just a bunch of mechanics."
Champion Motorsports competed in seven of 10 Grand Am Cup races last season and has participated in the Grand Am Koni Challenge on a limited basis this season.
Last month at Mid-Ohio, driving the Mustang when it was set up to Grand American Road Racing specifications, Brown won the American Iron Extreme class.
Brown, 34, won the Ohio-Indiana region American Iron championship in 2004 and its American Iron Extreme championship in 2005 before selling his excavating business and joining Champion Motorsports in 2006.
"I'm hoping we can go to nationals and it turns into us running more of the NASA events next year," Brown said.
"Because that's where we're going to get customers for the business. The Grand Am racing, it kind of legitimizes our business a little bit but, really, the NASA events are where we're going to pull those customers from - at least from the road racing scene."