A 12-Second, LS-Swapped…Chevy Lumina?

Father-son duo spends two years turning a Firebird WS6 into a tire-melting sleeper. We don’t understand it, either, but we’re glad it happened.

Few people ever would look twice at a Chevy Lumina, which is what makes this one so incredible. Underneath the two-door Lumina bodywork, this is really a fourth-generation Pontiac Firebird WS6. And its builder spent more than two years putting it together.

This forum thread just had its 10th anniversary, so we aren’t talking a recent phenomenon. Indeed, many LS1Tech readers have probably seen this car online or in person. However, we stumbled over it and were floored by how well it’s put together.

The owner explains in the first post that he liked the Lumina Z34 but found it underpowered. Ironically, the Z34’s 3.4-liter V6 made more horsepower (210) for several years than all but the IROC V8, but he wanted more. Nothing really fit the bill, so he decided to just turn an F-Body into a Lumina.

The donor cars were utterly perfect, too. The Lumina Z34 wore a perfectly 1990s dragon decal on its doors while the WS6 had smashed a deer. A match made in heaven.

Incredibly, the builder and his son, who helped, had never before undertaken anything quite so ambitious. Considering they had to add a few inches to the bodywork, that was no small detail. However, as you dig through the build thread, they put things together quite nicely.

Like weird swaps? Check out this LS4-swapped Saturn!

They celebrated its build, as you should with a burnout. From there, the car raced at drag strips in Indiana for a couple years. It wasn’t setting the world alight, but the “Z57” (Z + displacement, 5.7 liters) was capable of running pretty close the factory WS6 quarter-mile times in the 12s.