Well assuming you will be racing someday soon, you might want to track down a local club, to see what they're running so that it'll be headed in the right direction when you get to that point. There are several local chapters over in your neck of the woods and you should be able to find one somewhere nearby on the
G-Team G-Sources page.
Otherwise, I'd probably recommend 12hp Briggs Flatty for your first build; shoot for something along the lines of the IMOW Class or possibly even SP Class. There are plenty of parts out there for them, they build up fairly easy, and if you do build for IMOW you'd be able to advance the build into an SP class machine at a later date without a great deal of hassle.
