I'm from a racing background also.
I started out in my teens racing big cubic inch V-8 engines in the early 80's.
Then in the last 10years I went to the small cubic inch four cylinders and took a efi101 class put on by Ben Strader. I was then hooked on efi systems and never looked back.
My fastest car I built and tuned was a 68 Camaro that went 8.0@178mph in the 1/4. But my favorite car was a my 94 Honda Civic with a single cam 1.6L that went 11.8 @130mph spinning to half track. This car got great fuel mileage and was a great car all the way round.
Once I started looking at the great BSFC numbers these modern small engines run at, and the fact that they have very little drive-train loss and are light weight. I never had any reason to build a big cubic engine again.
So my new goal is to have my Del sol get 50+ miles and be able to run 10 second ET's. Plus I made it a flex fuel vehicle. It will run on E85 at the track and regular pump gasoline when its in a daily driver mode.