Fast car with an even better story - 9 sec Turbo Fbody inside
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Our longtime friend and customer Tommy Garst is the proud owner of a 1999 hugger orange Camaro SS, and recently brought it to us to help finalize the combination and achieve the ET goal that he is been waiting so long to achieve. The vehicle was originally owned by his childhood best friend who unfortunately passed away years ago forcing his family to sell the car. While randomly browsing the pages of LS1tech one evening, Tommy found the car for sale again and knew that he had to have it back in his possession to complete the build that his friend had always wanted. The next morning he drove 8 hours only to have the seller back out of the deal at the last minute.
Fast forward a year or two, Tommy ended up purchasing an inferno red 5th gen Camaro that we had the pleasure of modifying with a cam/header package, Whipple supercharger, and many other small parts. Tommy loved the car competing in many different events with it, but still was not exactly what he wanted. The gentleman who backed out of the sale those years ago on the 4th gen ended up reaching back out to him as he didn’t realize that they both had mutual friends who explained to the seller what the back story was on the car. Once he realized how important the car was to Tommy, he decided that he would in fact let the car go back in his hands. However, the car was undriveable when Tommy received it.
Since then, Tommy has worked at picking out every detail of what has been done to the car based on how his longtime friend would have wanted it. He even went so far as to build a solo garage for the car to stay in, and as far as he is aware the car still has never seen rain in its nearly 20 years and 40,000 miles of time on the streets.
After some rough dealings with vendors over the years, Tommy reached out to the team here at VR to see if we would consider working on the car. Being that the car had been previously modified it was not a typical project for us to take on, however we all still have a love for the F-Body, and value Tommy’s loyalty and business over the years and were happy to welcome the car into the shop to help in completing his and his friend’s dream build.
Since then we have gone back through the 370ci iron block engine, buttoned up the Huron Speed Products turbo system fitted with a single 91mm T6 turbocharger, installed an RPM Transmissions TH400 transmission and FTI Performance torque converter, Moser Racing12-bolt rear end, and went through the car thoroughly before tuning it here in house.
Just a few weeks ago we finally had the opportunity to get the car out to a drag strip to test the combination that Tommy had been working so hard to put together. The goal was a 9-second ET which was quickly shattered in the first pass off of the trailer. The end result for the day was a 9.1 @ 149mph through a torque converter that needs some heavy adjustment to work better with the combination.
We will be sending the converter back out later this year and doing a few more small tweaks to get Tommy an 8-second time slip, but in the meantime he has been enjoying the car on nice days around his Tennessee home taking his daughter out for ice cream and runs to the grocery store!
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Check out the video below of Tommy’s car and runs at the track, and stay tuned for more updates on this beast coming throughout the year!