This is how it all began...

When you spend your day climbing 138,000-volt power transmission towers to perform maintenance tasks, getting behind the wheel of an eight-second drag car isn’t really that daunting of a task. For Pennsylvania’s Rick Steinke, that eight-second drag car is actually the same car that he drove in high school – a 1967 four-door Chevelle Malibu sedan that he’s owned since the age of 14. It was a present from his parents in 1994, and he drove it all through high school, then back and forth to Pittsburgh for college.

“I had this car built as a bracket car back in 1998, but over the winter of ’99 I acquired my Monte Carlo, pulled the engine out of this car to put in that one, and it sat in my parents’ backyard for the next six years. My wife Jacki started bugging me to get the car out of there, and six years ago I started on this project and got the bug to turn it into what it is today,” he explained. 

Racing runs in the family – Steinke’s father and brother-in-law, Bob and Tony Neimczyk, campaign a six-second Comp Eliminator turbo Mitsubishi four-cylinder that we’ve covered right here on Dragzine, and at the time Tony was running around in a ten-second Eclipse street car with a 74mm turbocharger.

“After seeing how quick his car was with a 74mm turbo on a little two-liter engine, I started wondering what one would do on a V8 engine – that’s where the idea came from to build this car the way it is. It was supposed to be a 67mm turbo on a 283 and ended up being an 80mm turbo on a 355. We were going to build a 12.0 index car, and the very first pass down the track the car ran 11.0’s. Before I knew it we were going 9.50’s, and then all the way down to 8.90’s.

The first combo had an old tractor turbo and it went 8.90’s like that. Over this past winter I freshened the engine up and put the new Borg Warner turbo on it along with an air-to-water intercooler. We also did some suspension work and pulled about 100 pounds out of the car. The heads are 14-year old heads, and I haven’t really done a whole lot to try to make it faster,” Steinke said.

The car hobby lately has seen a resurgence in the “weathered” look, and Steinke’s Chevelle was ahead of the curve by a couple years. You’d never know that this near 3,600-pound lead sled is capable of running an 8.60 at over 157 MPH – it embodies the word “sleeper” in all its forms.

Steinke does almost all of his own work, including the installation of the S&W 10-point cage that he added a couple of bars to in order to help conceal the cage for street driving. The 355-cubic-inch engine, after being machined by Scott Woodington at Engine Specialties in Delran, NJ, was assembled in the garage by Steinke himself using a forged Eagle crank and rods to go with a set of Wiseco pistons. A set of 1998-vintage Air Flow Research 227 heads set the compression ratio at 9.3:1, and the air is pulled in through a homeported Professional Products Hurricane intake manifold and CSU 850 cfm carburetor.

Power runs through a Precision Transmission-built Turbo 400 and through a Precision Shaft Technologies 4130 driveshaft into a twelve-bolt GM rearend stuffed with a Strange Engineering spool and Richmond gears.

Steinke is quick to tout the improvements he’s made since installing a converter from Pro Torque, as prior to its installation he had been having trouble building boost.

“The car was running 10.0’s at 145, and I couldn’t get the car to run the front half of the track at all, no matter what I did with the tuneup, it just wouldn’t go. I started talking to Joe Rivera from Pro Torque and he guaranteed me I’d see full boost within two seconds and would work with me until we got the converter figured out. Sure enough, I put it in, and it made all the difference in the world – it changed everything I was doing. I hadn’t been having much fun racing the car before that, but it’s been fun again since then. It’s hands-down the best converter I’ve ever worked with,” he said. 

The real fun, however, sits in the engine bay –  a Borg Warner S480 80mm turbocharger, pushing the boost through an owner-built turbo kit. The car originally had an older turbo on it, and he was amazed when he put this new one on. The turbo alone was worth over 100 horsepower over the older design, and between the new parts and the assistance from the Niemczyk clan he’s been having the time of his life.

The new Ultra Street 275 class runs at the Street Car Shootout Series at Cecil County next season, and Steinke felt the car could be competitive until he realized that 632’s with Big Chief heads are legal in the class. Those are capable of running 5.0’s in the eighth, and his car is good for low 5.40’s as it sits. As the car is 400 pounds overweight, he’s got a choice to make. He doesn’t want to take the car apart and take the fun away from it, but in order to be ultra-competitive, he’s at least two tenths off the pace right now. His other option is the 8.50 index class that runs at Cecil, Atco, and Englishtown. Since the car qualifies and goes rounds, that may be his best option. 

No drag racing effort is complete without the help of one’s crew and sponsors, and Steinke has to thank a number of people for helping him get where he is today with this project. His family, including Jacki, his son Troy, mom Ginny, Crew Chief Adam Smith, Kevin Baker, George Martinelli, and Nick “Photo Guy” Imperiale are all a part of the team. Bob, Roger, and Tony Neimczyk are integral to the project, and Uncle Ron Steinke does all of the miscellaneous non-engine machine work.

A number of companies have been helpful in his program as well, including Lorenzo’s Fast Flow Cylinder Heads, Seth Temple from BorgWarner Turbo Systems, Rick Gorski from Firecore50 Spark Plug Wires, and Nui, Ha, and Hung from Extreme PSI in Bensalem, PA – as he says, the import guys helping out the old-school V8 guy.

Whatever happens with his program, Steinke will be rolling in one of the coolest machines at the track.