“Our goal was to make the Joliet NMCA/NMRA race,” said Jarod Wenricks. However, he hasn’t even been able to test the car so it looks like we won’t be able to see his Lyons Custom Motorsports-built Chevy II Super Sport until the NMCA Norwalk race. However, we offer you this little appetizer on the car until you can get the full entree at Norwalk.
Wenricks bought the car from Brian Brooks as a leaf spring car on nitrous. He switched it over to a turbo, but it didn’t act right on the leaf springs so he switched to a ladder bar suspension. Being from Dayton, Ohio, Wenricks took the Deuce over to Kil Kare Dragway for testing. On the very first pass the car went about 30-feet and hard left into the wall. Though Wenricks has raced some fast cars in the past, including winning the 2007 NSCA Pro Street championship, he couldn’t catch it in time. “First pass in a radial car, and I crash it,” said Wenricks.
When that happened he thought about parting out the car and finding something else to do. “My daughter Darani left a post-it note one morning for me saying, ‘Never Give Up,’” he adds. His son Jaran also helped get the car running the first time around, and Wenricks just didn’t want to go out like that.
In talking to Patrick Barnhill about a shop recommendation to straighten out the car, Barnhill sent Wenricks to Tim Lyons to get the Chevy II back in fighting form. While at Lyons Custom Motorsports, the Chevy II was essentially rebuilt from top to bottom with NMCA Street Outlaw in mind. “I wanted to get back into a class that when you slam the door, you hear metal to metal, that’s what I wanted,” Wenricks says. Most of his previous drag cars were, of course, carbon-dressed chassis cars, and he wanted a different sensation this time around.
For power, the Chevy II will boast a 434-inch Dart block combination with a Callies crank, GRP rods, Diamond pistons, a BES Racing cam, Jesel belt drive, M&M Revolution billet heads and intake, a Keith Berry elbow, Wilson throttle body, and Billet Atomizer injectors. Since Wenricks ran a ProCharger in the past, he decided to go back with one of the company’s F-1X-12 superchargers with a Chris Alston gear drive, while Barnhill tunes the combo via a Big Stuff 3 engine management and coil-on plug arrangement.
Behind the small block is a Rossler turbo glide with a Mark Micke converter, which transers the power through a carbon driveshaft back to a Lyons-built, fabricated 9-inch housing stuffed with Strange Engineering components. The front and rear suspensions were built in-house by Lyons, and feature Santuff struts up front and Mark Menscher shocks out back. The rear suspension benefits from Don Ness 4-link brackets designed for infinite adjustabilty to make sure the Mickey Thompson 275s have plenty of grip. The Chevy II wears Weld Racing V-Series wheels front and rear with 15×12 Mac-Fab beadlock examples out back.
This past Friday Wenricks and his son Jaran saw the car for the first time, and he says it’s a work of art. “I’m almost tearing up,” Jaran said.
We look forward to seeing it for ourselves at Norwalk.