The EFI Store Building Drag Week Camaro From Our Project Car Ashes

Sometimes in the magazine business, a project car is started and doesn’t come to fruition. Parts are acquired, articles written, and then for some reason or another the semi-complete project gets discarded in favor of another, prettier, more capable, sexier piece to finish off whatever vision the magazine publisher had in mind when the initial project was conceived.

Such is the case with this Camaro, now owned by Brian Macy of The EFI Store and Horsepower Connection in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The longtime EFI tuner and tuning instructor acquired the Camaro through a third party, after it was sold off. The 2000 Chevrolet Camaro was originally built up back in 2010 as a lowly 3.8L V6 bomber, with plans to convert it into a nine-second naturally aspirated car with an LS engine and carburetor under the hood, before it was sold off prior to its final completion.

Once Macy got his hands on the car, it sat in the Horsepower Connection facility for a while until he decided it was going to be full-steam-ahead on the project to make it a top-line machine for Drag Week competition in the small-block power adder class.

Now before you go thinking that this is going to be an LS-powered build like everything else on the planet, stop right there. It seems that Macy had a lot of the parts to be installed in this machine sitting in the shop, including an engine that was the twin to Shawn Fink’s Drag Week engine.

“The engine is a 406-cube, old-style small-block Chevrolet based around a Dart tall-deck small-block. It has a Jeff Johnson oil pan setup, Titan oil pump, GRP aluminum connecting rods, and COMP Cams roller-camshaft setup with roller cam bearings,” says Macy.

Interestingly, the cylinder heads are not the typical high-dollar aluminum pieces you’d expect to see on an engine of this caliber. The cylinder heads are from RHS and are of cast iron construction. “What we found that with small block aluminum cylinder heads, when you get the boost up real high, you can melt the cylinder head in between the middle cylinders. You basically get a limited number of passes on them and then they’re gone. These are a 14-degree iron cylinder head that was originally built for Jr. Fuel, and they already have a lot of the little tricks for running lots of boost. We’re figuring that the cylinder head’s integrity alone is going to help make more horsepower. It’s heavier, but so what? These flow some really big numbers,” he says.

He also converted one of RHS’s carb-style intake manifolds to work with fuel injection. The engine management of choice on this car will be the XFI system from FAST that Macy’s so familiar with, having taught the tuning classes on the system for EFI University over the last several years.

“Last year in the small-block power adder class, they were running 8.0, 8.10. We expect to be able to run into the seven-second zone with this car,” says Macy. 

In order to make that type of power, a 106mm turbocharger will be employed in front of the engine, as he feels that the turbo size is well-suited to the power-handling capability of the engine. A Powerglide transmission will be used along with a Moser Engineering nine-inch rearend to get the power to the ground. Racecraft Inc. suspension is underneath, and the team is expecting to have the car completed in the middle of August in order to have some testing time before Drag Week begins.

There’s a nice gallery of photos over on the company’s Facebook page, so head on over and check them out. Hit the big “Like” button too in order to stay abreast of the happenings at The EFI Store.