After spending his youth around drag racing and recently taking ownership of a Kentucky drag strip, Chris Mattingly is stepping back into the competitive side of the sport with a purpose-built, twin-turbocharged 1969 Camaro designed to blur the lines between PDRA Pro Street and no-time radial racing.

“I’ve been around racing my whole life,” Mattingly says. “My dad had Super Stock and Stockers, and we did a lot of NHRA and IHRA stuff together when I was younger. I ran a Stock Eliminator car when I was 16 or 17, then did some outlaw dragster stuff with my dad before stepping away for a bit.”

That break led to a stint in the powerboat world, but he was eventually pulled back into drag racing. After wrecking a couple of no-prep cars, Mattingly decided it was time to build something that could compete on a different level, and give him more flexibility.

“I went to David Monday and told him I wanted to do something that could work in multiple places,” Mattingly explains. “Maybe run some radial races, maybe hit a PDRA Pro Street event. So we decided on a 1969 Camaro. It’s got the look I wanted, and the platform made sense.”

The lightweight car features a steel roof and quarters with carbon-fiber everywhere else, riding on a 25.2 double framerail chassis. Power comes from a 499 cubic-inch Noonan Hemi with twin 88mm Precision turbos, backed by an M&M three-speed transmission. Adam and Isaac Preston at Next Motorsports Race Cars are outfitting the car with Ron G rear shocks, and Strange Engineering handles the rearend and axle setup.

The project spent about two years at Monday’s shop, mostly due to a major midstream change.

“I’m a big guy, and when I first sat in it, I told David it felt like I was stuffed in a sardine can,” Mattingly laughs. “He ended up scrapping the interior and redoing it. That cost us some time, but he got it right. He did a great job on the car.”

Final wiring and a Holley EFI system are being installed now by the Preston’s in Kentucky, and Mattingly hopes to have the Camaro ready for testing within a few weeks. His plans for where to race it are still fluid.

“There’s so much big-money no-time racing going on. It was built with PDRA Pro Street in mind, but if I show a time slip, I can’t run no-time. So we’re just going to test it, see how fast it is, and decide from there. I don’t get to race much in the summer with everything going on at the track, but come winter, we’re going to shake it down and see what it can really do.”

Either way, he’s all-in.

Mattingly wanted a build that could go rounds and turn heads, anywhere he chooses to line it up. “At the end of the day, I just want to race,” he says in closing. “Whether it’s on radials or slicks, no-time or Pro Street, I built this car to be fast, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go.”