the forums over at
grassroots motorsports are like the "varsity OOT" that has been proposed for the street racing crowd. not a lot of 16yr olds though.
if you would like to know how to extract more performance from your current car, i would browse around there for a while. there is less variance w/ strait line street racing, but for going around turns, driver skill is 90% (arbitrary number, but you get the point).