Welcome to the Camaro page.

It recently hit us that the full specs and story behind the build of this car have never found their way onto the main site (you can see the original page that is admittedly not very informative or current here), so here we go with righting that wrong.

We went to the Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car and had a blast!
Read about our experience this this two part recap:

• Optima at TMS Part 1
• Optima at TMS Part 2

Since this page will be pretty long, heres a quick table of contents to get around with:

• the backstory
• the build (chassis, rear suspension, body/paint)
• the specs
• the pictures

Where this all Started

The story of this car starts with a 63 Chevy truck. How does that work, exactly? The truck was the first massive undertaking, beginning way back in 1998 in the dark back room of the shop. Long story short, after a 4 year frame-off rebuild, 2 Power Tours, and a few car shows, we got kind of bored. Which left two options sitting before us: make the truck fast (which we would eventually get back around to), or start another project. Enter the blue pile Camaro..

The Victim

The car, a base model blue on blue 1979 Camaro 305 automatic, had been sitting in a shop for around 10 years when we picked it up in July 2005. It had been driven until the time it was parked by the owner’s ex-wife, and he had refused to sell it to several dirt racers who just wanted to, in his words, “cut it up.” Snickering to ourselves, we told him of our plans (sort of..) and loaded it up for the trip home.

Sitting inside over the years had kept it virtually rust free – a welcome revelation after fighting rust gremlins for literally years on the truck.

On to the Work

Tear down started as soon as we got home, and the brainstorming began. We knew we wanted something that would be quick, but in what way? Coming from a drag racing background, the most logical choice would have been simple: 6-point roll cage, Caltracs, slicks, and a severe weight reduction plan.

…Nobody’s ever accused us of being logical, though. Thanks to an increasing interest in autocross and road racing, we decided that building half a car (drag only), just wasn’t an option. We wanted to build a car that was competent, if not perfect, for everything – drag racing, autocross, speed runs, and some road course time. This presented several requirements right off the bat:

• It must be simple – every piece must earn it’s keep, be easy to access, and easy to adjust
• It must be tuneable – if we’re going to realistically drag race one weekend and autocross the next, a tuneable, adaptable suspension is a must
• It has to be streetable  – one of the primary goals for this car was to compete at Hot Rod’s Drag Week. And besides, if a drag-only car is half a car, a trailer-only car is no car in this scenario

So, with a few ground rules laid out, we began research. With both budget, and the basic ideas of making a drag car work in mind, the search began for a solution that could do it all, and be simple enough that we could tune it.

Hatching the Plan

About the time we were plotting our course, a new issue of Hot Rod Magazine arrived with a 69 Camaro on the cover doing the unthinkable – drifting. At this time, in Hot Rod at least, the G-machine craze was still a bit under wraps. We instantly pored over the article, soaking up every detail of the setup we could get, and scouring the web for more.

The car utilized a truck arm setup similar to those run in NASCAR (and to the truck already sitting in the shop), which looked simple enough. Utilizing coilovers and including a range of adjustment on various pieces seemed tuneable enough. After some searching we found that the raw parts for the setup were cheap enough. We’d also seen plenty of trucks with this setup hooking hard at the drag strip. So it was settled.

Armed only with tight pockets, determination, a bit of inspiration from the sideways green and blue monster, and pictures of a few other truck arm installs on cars (none on a second gen), we decided that the rear of the car would match the rear of the truck (what could possibly go wrong?). This decision sealed the fate of our next 2 years in the shop. What sounded like a great idea turned into an amazing, often overwhelming amount of work doing what we came to lovingly refer to as ‘stuffing 38 pounds of potatoes into a 5 pound sack.’

It was then time to get to work. See how the proceedings went starting on the individual pages: Chassis, Body/Paint. (more to be added as time permits)

Specs

Pics & Video

Pictures

• Build Gallery 1
• Build Gallery 2

Video

The crowning achievement of Drag Week 2009 – 10.998 at 124 in Muncie, IN

Check out more on our YouTube channel.