More EZ Boo Episodes

HorsePower Builds

Parts Used In This Episode

Centerforce
Aluminum flywheel, dual friction assembly for LS series motors.
Chevrolet Performance
ZZ572/620 short block.
Flaming River
Manual gearbox to column, complete column mount and floor mount.
Leading Edge Lubricants
Engine oil treatment/oil booster.
MSD Ignition
Drag race version.
Painless Performance
12 circuit kit with eight switch panel, fan relay, split braiding.

Video Transcript

Hey, look at what we got parked in the horsepower shop today. It's an 86 Monte Carlo. That's totally treatable yet totally lethal when it comes to eight mile drag racing. In fact, this is the only car in its class that's gone down the strip in less than five seconds.

Let's take a look under the hood and see one of the reasons why

it's a turbo charge. 436 inch small block that's backed up by a good old power glide

and it belongs to Orsa Easy street racer, Shane Stack. Hey, Shane, congratulations on winning the Horsepower outlaw finals.

Now, this is one of the reasons we decided to build an easy street car here in the horsepower shop. It's one of the most affordable, challenging and funnest heads up racing classes out there.

They call it easy street maybe because it's easier on the pocket book than most other heads up classes.

It's designed for street legal cars from major manufacturers weighing at least 3000 pounds.

The body except for hood and buffers has got to be stopped

and that goes for the interior suspension and frame rails as well.

So how do these easy street machines run in the low fives on the eight mile strip.

Well, as long as the engines in the stock location,

it can be any combination you want with all the power adder you need.

Oh, but don't forget you have to plant all that big power on these little drag radial tires.

A lot of the guys they leave on the, on the

suite. We don't, we leave on the, just on the motor

and uh then we turn a small kid on and then turn the bigger kid on. I have a little farther, you know, and you, and that's how you have to

like, Kincade Robbie Irwin uses Nitrous with his mustang that won him a series championship in the class.

Well, a lot of it has to do in the, you know, the tuning of the engine and the tuning of the uh suspension.

Uh that's, that's basically, you know, what, what makes you get down through there, Mickey Thompson also, you know, they put out a really nice, nice tower board for you.

Of course, the car doesn't have to be another Mustang and the power adder can be a lo or turbo charger,

Shane Stag drove this Turbo

charged Monte Carlo to a first place win

in the

Oscar finals at Carolina Dragway.

One more awesome car in a truly awesome heads up flat.

Hey, Shane, thanks for coming by today. Uh Got any advice for us before you leave.

Yeah. Just, uh, make it safe and make it fast, but not too fast because I wanna win another championship. Ok, well done,

man. I hope our sounds that good when it's through. Now. We're setting a budget for this project of get this under 10 grand, partially because we already have a motor and transmission from a previous project. Now, it's our 572 big block that used to have a home and a project that was pretty popular. We called Supernova.

We dropped it into the 69 Nova along with a huge tranny a couple of years ago after working some bugs out, we made some shakedown passes

before taking it to a quarter mile strip in Memphis where it ran in the high nines.

Now, we sold the car recently to another racer, minus the motor and transmission.

Then ran the 572 on our

dyno and got 740 horsepower.

Man, that was pretty impressive. Now, just wait until we install our pro charger and get this thing hammered on some alcohol.

Yeah, but to get this project really rolling, we need a car and after an extensive search, we found just the candidate down the road a little bit,

got the trailer hooked up. It's ready. Let's roll.

What happened to our traitor? Looks like it's been in a wreck.

I think the extreme crew used it as a vertical ramp.

Yeah, probably to catch Bigfoot after he jumped that airplane.

They trashed that thing

little more.

Well, here it is. And what it is is a 79 Chevy Malibu that's been elected as our easy street car. Now, underneath all this green from the trees is actually some blue paint. But another good reason why we chose this car is how straight the body is and there's virtually no rod underneath. That's right. And of course, we're gonna replace this hood with fiberglass. But under here is another good reason for choosing this.

Some of our work is already cut out for us. No, motor,

plenty of room for that. 572. Don't you think

it's gonna look good in here? The big old pro charger? Oh, yeah.

Hey, let's show them that luxury interior. Oh, you think we should? Yeah. Now, don't let this scare you. It's a little rough right now. But the stock

is going back in according to the rules. Of course, seats are coming out, carpets going in. You won't recognize this thing in a few weeks. Right. And let's get it on the trailer and get it back to the shop and start on it. All right. I

can't wait.

Who is this? We,

well, we got Horsepower's first official Malibu project. We need to get this thing back and get started on it. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of work, but it's gonna be fun and it's gonna be different than every other race car. That's true and different from anything we've ever done, but best of all, it's gonna be fast.

All right, we're off to the races. Well, not quite, but we do have a good start on the road to building our first horsepower easy street racer.

Well, we finally made it back to the shop with our newest horsepower project car. The 79 2 door Malibu. We plan on going easy street heads up racing with now before we get it in the shop and tear it apart, we need to give it a bath. Go ahead and fire it up.

Eight,

a great job. But

now I can't tell what color this thing is. I can't either. I think it's a burp, burp

maybe.

All right, let's get to work on this beautiful interior. We're gonna replace the stock dash to comply with the rules that is after we tear out everything we don't need in this sink. Now, we can have some racing seats up front and the rules say we can also tear out the back seat as long as we lay down some carpet. So

good. Buy beautiful furniture.

Now, as you saw earlier, we bought this car without an engine and transmission and I'm glad we did. Now, we don't have to pull it out to put our big 572 in here. Now, we're also getting rid of this whole ac unit and luckily we found a buyer for it this fast, which helps us out on our budget and we'll replace it with an ac delete plate.

The rules say we can replace the heavy stock hood with a lightweight fiberglass piece.

They also allow us to remove the front bumper

and rear one that'll also get lighter replacements

back under the hood. We can remove the brake booster and master cylinder.

And since we don't need wipers, this motor can go to lose some more weight.

We're also getting rid of all this factory wiring. I wouldn't trust this stuff in racing anyway.

And in this place we go a painless race ready kit that also allows us to use turn signals, headlights, taillights

again according to the rule book. Ok. You ready for me to pull this thing now?

Yeah, you guessed it. The stock steering column goes too.

We're also getting rid of the stock power steering box and steering shaft and for the shaft and column we call Flaming River for a rural friendly oe style replacement. And for the box, we'll show you that later on in the build

with our Malibu in the lift, we can remove the front sway bar,

lower the car a little and remove the shocks.

Then back on the ground, we pop the upper control arms loose,

remove the springs,

then both control arms

and finally the steering link

out back. The stock rear end comes out by first unbolting the shocks,

pulling out the springs

and cutting the brake lines.

Then we can on both the upper control arms

and the lower ones.

So the rear comes out as an assembly, who knows, maybe we'll get a couple bucks for this thing too since we are pinching our pennies on this project.

Now, as for its replacement, we did some homework and most guys that are racing in cars like ours and making lots of power, use a T

boat. So I guess we'll go shopping for a nine inch or a 60 series. Now, the last thing to go under here is the stock fuel tank. Now, keep this in mind if you plan on running alcohol like we are, the pump is most likely gonna be mounted up on the engine and for the volume of fuel needed, the new cell will be up there too.

Well, that's pretty much how you strip a street car to go easy street racing. Now, next time we'll set up all of our suspension pieces, figure out our ride height and install all of our steering components. Then after we install our new fiberglass hood and bumpers, we can start building a road cage for this thing and

even figure out our paint scheme anyway, hang out with us and maybe you'll get fired up to build a race car too.

I love this thing

to be competitive in drag racing these days. You got to have three things, a good driver, a good car and good information.

That's why racers rely on data loggers to provide the feedback they need to win. Now, this is race pack's V 300 SD which samples information up to 1000 times a second using various optical sensors. Well, recently I tagged along with a father son team to see how dragstrip data helped pave the way to a national championship.

It took years of struggling before N MC A S. John Stanley won a season championship in pro outlaw drag race

with his veteran racer dead camp as crew chief Stanley found the right engine blower combination for his big block Camaro.

The right suspension set up

and the right information they needed after each pass at each different track,

the information is vital these days to make critical round by round adjustments to conditions inside and outside the car

information you can only get with battle logging technology.

And when we run the race, we bring the race back cartridge out, plug it into the top of the, the computer.

Let me

bring the race

back cartridge into the trailer,

plug it into the little upload center.

Ok.

Uploaded to the computer

which is actually

fairly easy

from the cartridge. They download information on the fuel flow and fuel pressure, boost, oil pressure plus RPM readings from the engine trans and even the clutch.

If there's anybody out there in TV, land watching this, that knows what they're looking at. We kind of drove through the clutch on that run but

we made a fairly good ride

6 48 2, 21. So that's a good starting point for us and by not having near enough counterweight on it, we, the motor tried to drive away from the clutch in high gear,

but this is a new combination for us and we're trying to figure it out

in the early days of racing. Data acquisition was non existent except for checking spark plugs and maybe using a crude weather station

Today. The Stanleys have a sophisticated weather station inside their computer one that even sends up to the minute updates to this pocket pa

So at this day and age, you really can't race without one of these games. If you can't race without this kind of data, you absolutely positively cannot do it

have to be in the 21st century.

Hey, welcome back to the show and to the uh power block parking lot of sorts. This is where all of our shows, keep their project vehicles that are waiting for work or waiting for testing or just waiting.

Now, there are a lot of muscle cars here and for good reason, Lou likes to fab them up on his show, Mike and I like to power them up on ours.

And recently the S A

show in Las Vegas paid special tribute to the American muscle car and all the new stuff designed to make them look good and go fast,

easily the best bet in Vegas for an eye popping mind. Boggling gearhead experience

the biggest aftermarket show on earth for cars and trucks.

Over 150,000 people from around the globe gather here and the public's not even invited.

These folks are here to buy and sell the newest stuff they hope you'll eventually want to buy for your ride.

The vendors vie for attention in all sorts of creative ways, including the display of over 1000 restored and custom built hot rods. Some outstanding, some well,

outrageous might be a compliment.

This, by the way is the 40 th anniversary of a show that only gets bigger every year.

It's also a celebration of the American Muscle

this year at

SA

and Well, for GM, the show Stopper has to be the new concept. Camaro inspired by the 69.

This version has the LS two make 400 horsepower. Now it's anybody's guess what it will have in 09 when it hits production.

When we're talking about modern muscle here at the Ford Booth, it's all about the mustangs and here's one that really caught my eye. It's an 07 Shelby GT five

500 that's been set up specifically for drag racing

that was put together by Paul's high performance and holds the record for the fastest Shelby in the quarter mile at 10 seconds.

They've taken away some weight and after the show, they're shooting for the nines,

you guys can keep all that new stuff. I'm going old. 70 Charger 472. Hemi

with a five speed. That's the only way to go

old hard core muscle later

is a time to honor industry leaders who keep the high performance lifestyle on the road. Like Ray Taco

from summit racing. W

tech's man of the year

and

Sema is prime time for the innovators who helped develop new power components. You'll see on the street this year,

you've not got rich cylinders and lean cylinders having to compete with each other. So you're not throwing as much out the tailpipe.

And so I don't know exactly what we'll get for better fuel economy, but I know it'll be better because the,

the fuel distribution at idle is just phenomenal

over at GM performance parts. The big buzz was about the 640 horse LSX freight boat

developed with assistance from the pro stock professor himself, Warren Johnson,

we came up with a design change to make it an extremely reliable block in which you can put other performance enhancements on it such as superchargers, nitrous oxide turbo charging. What have you

without having any durability issues? That's the key to this whole block is, it's been a very durable beast.

The only negative about S

A

is the sore feet you'll get trying to take in all the gearhead candy store goodies packed into over 2 million square feet. Quite a feet, quite a spectacle. A sure sign the high performance lifestyle is more alive than ever.

Let's say you got a late model LS one under your hood and you want to use a power adder with it. Well, in that case, better add some power to your clutch setup.

This is center forces, dual friction clutch and match performance pressure plate.

Now, 12 inches in diameter, it's a half inch larger than stock and designed for the ultimate in holding and durability. Now, it's engineered to be the ultimate street strip performance set up without sacrificing pedal effort and driver control. Now, if you like one of these for your Ls One ride be prepared to pay about 330 bucks. Here's a good companion for that set up and it also comes from center force. It's a heavy duty lightweight fly wheel that's sf I approved and comes with a mechanically attached starter ring gear. Now, it also has replaceable steel friction surfaces that have been heat treated for extra long life. So if you feel the heat, you got to have one of these plan on spending about 560 bucks,

no matter what kind of motor you're running, leading edge lubricants has an engine treatment and oil booster design to make it last longer. The ingredients in this bottle are designed to reduce friction and wear while bringing up horsepower and torque. One of these bottles will treat up to six quarts of oil and it's ideal for nitrous and turbo applications. You can pick up a bottle for about 17 bucks at your local o'reilly's Parts Store. We got a great show in store for you next time.

Why don't you come back and join us?
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