Yes, for your intended applications, they are about equal in performance. Most likely you will be the limiting factor. You may have some spring wrap up at the drag strip if you use slicks on a prepared track with the Hotchkis. I've never seen an answer from Hotchkis about their capability in that regard, so I'd assume they are only marginally better than stock in that specific application. You can most likely overcome that deficit with a pinion snubber that you bolt on for drag strip use.
The advantages of coil over systems are that they usually allow you to create alternate suspension layouts that may better optimize the geometry, they are lighter than most components they replace, they are more compact so they take up less room, they allow faster spring changes to adjust to track differences, they tend to have additional adjustment points in their systems to allow a greater range of tuning (like height), and by utilizing the spring exclusively as a spring, you can use other components for more single purposes to better optimize their roll in the suspension system. For example, a leaf spring must act as a fore/aft and side to side locating device in addition to provide wrap resistance, roll resistance, roll height, and spring resistance. In a coil over system, each of those functions can be separated out to an individual piece. However, as pointed out geometry improvements may not always come about because of the change, although the lack of ackerman pointed out above isn't always a concern in competition cars, but certainly is in a street car. Of course coil over systems have a certain "wow" factor to some.
