Sometimes we have to wonder why anyone is trying to make N/A power anymore. We concede that there are a zillion racing rules to prevent power-adders from dominating, and turbos look kinda complicated. But you'll need to get over it. We realized this after getting hooked on watching those turbo small-block guys on YouTube beat the hell out of Vipers and any sportbike jockey willing to risk the road rash. Forget the big cam and loose converter; you won't need 'em. You don't even have to wonder how to stash a big-block under the hood or where to cut the blower hole. All you need is a turbo or two to make obscene power, and we're going to show you how to get one.

Tech Notes
What: '64 Ford Falcon Futura

When it comes to car crafting, it's all about horsepower. The latest darling for the GM devotees of more power is the newest generation of small-block engines, more accurately termed Gen III and Gen IV. These new-millennium small-blocks are quickly becoming a favorite engine swap powerplant. For those willing to spend a little coin on building something a little more exotic, there are plenty of opportunities to expand the stock bore and stroke combinations for more displacement. If you've got deeper pockets, the LS2 and LS3 engines offer larger bores right out of the box, combined with an enticing all-aluminum structure. Or you can pony up for an iron block from GM Performance Parts, aluminum World Products Warhawk block, or a CNC billet Dart piece. Whichever way, you have the foundation for big inches.

Though it was irresponsible, we can't blame Mark Wells for what he did and why he put his car into hiding. In fact, we probably would have done the same thing in his situation. Imagine some punk rolling up in a clearly inferior ride and challenging you and your car to "man up." You do your best to ignore all his extraneous revving and trash talking, but each of us has a tipping point. Mark reached his with a fool in an IROC-Z, destroying him handily at the stoplight drags. In the process, he passed the local fuzz at nearly 100 mph. Oops. Luckily for him, John Law didn't take chase, but Mark told us he went straight home and locked his GTX in the garage. "I figured I needed to keep it off the streets for a while." This all went down in 1988, and Mark's GTX wouldn't see the light of day for the next 14 years.

Build Your Own
Ford only built 50 of these cars, but if you wanted to replicate the effort, it would be expensive but possible. Ford actually offers the body in white over the counter, but it would be a good idea to buy a wrecked V-6 Mustang for all the little parts that would be otherwise too expensive to purchase individually. The accompanying part numbers are incomplete because it is probably too early to get all the gritty price details. The idea would be to build a replica or tribute car that would be as close as possible to the real cars, but you'd want to make sure everyone knew this was not a real factory effort--misrepresenting a car like this would be bad form.

Brandon Banfield was at the Wednesday night test 'n' tune at the Milan Dragway in Milan, Michigan, with his '64 Mustang to do some suspension testing. On his first run, the car simply leaped into the air. Local photographer Mike Yoksich snapped it with all four wheels off the ground. "Brandon got confused when I asked him to launch his car," Yoksich says.

Ask any designer and he'll tell you that fastback styling-where the roofline drops aggressively down into the deck panel-works best on small cars with really short wheelbases. Adding a fastback roof to a big car can go wrong quickly and deliver the look of a melted station wagon. That's what the experts say. But when it comes to the '68 to '69 Torino fastback, Ford stylists got it right when they embellished the Fairlane with that huge sloping lid and big glass window. Sure, the minuscule trunk opening was best suited to mailing letters, but as add-on fastbacks go, it's a winner. Here's a sweet original-paint '69 Torino GT we found at Desert Valley Auto Parts (dvap.com; 800/905-8024). Wait till you look inside-there's a surprise on the tree.

302CI Chevy Z/28
Chad Raynal, San Jose, CA
If you haven't noticed, we really dig the late '60s Trans-Am cars, so when we ran across Chad Raynal's '69 Camaro, we had to show you the engine compartment. Chad owns an original '69 Z/28 Camaro that is a documented veteran of the SCCA Trans-Am circuit in May and June 1972, originally raced by Richard Sterbins and later campaigned by William MacFarlane. The car finished 13th in the Lime Rock race in May and then suffered a DNF (did not finish) at Watkins Glen in June 1972. Chad now races the car in the Historic Trans-Am (HTA) series that will be racing in 2009 at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, May 29-31 and the excellent Coronado Classic that is part of Fleet Week in San Diego September 25-27. The HTA series requires all the cars to be period correct as much as possible, which means no modern road race amenities such as G-Force transmissions or electronic data-logging. If you've never seen these cars run, it's worth the trip to get a taste of what it was like in the early days of Trans-Am.

Did you miss it last month? CC built a very basic Buick 455 and dyno-tested multiple combinations of two camshafts and four intake manifolds. It was entertaining, but the dead spot was in the stock cylinder heads. This month, the resolution: We're going to see how the stock, Stage 1-spec iron heads look when faced with Edelbrock and TA Performance heads in this big comparo of price, features, and power.

The small town of House Springs, Missouri, may be little more than a smudge on the map, but it probably has more car crafters and car guys per capita than any city in America. We spent a day last fall with some of those guys, including Jim Williams, who wheels this radical '78 Malibu. When we met Jim, we expected to hear the usual story that this alcohol-fed, Rat-powered machine was the pinnacle achievement amid a long string of fast street cars that probably stretched back to high school. Instead, his story is much quicker. Just a few years ago, he bought a '94 Z28 Camaro for $3,000, ran the snot out of it, and was hooked. That led to the purchase of this project Malibu.

Drag Race Rear Suspensions
The demands of drag racing created a few interesting twists on the factory rear suspension designs. The most popular drag race rear suspension is the ladder bar combined with coilover shocks. This system entails a triangulated bar with two attachment points at the rear axle and a single connecting point at the chassis. The advantage of the ladder bar is that it usually does not require floorpan modifications to fit into the car, needing only a custom crossmember to attach the leading mounts. This also makes suspension tuning easier, since there are generally only three or four adjustment holes that reposition the bar's vertical placement. Ladder bars are most commonly used with coilover shocks but can also be employed in conjunction with leaf springs if you use a set of rollers or sliders that allow the leaf springs to roll through a different arc than the ladder bars. Sliders and ladder bars are most often found in NHRA Super Stock racing where rules prohibit the use of coilovers.

Tech Notes
What: Mopar's infamous '71 Hemi 'Cuda, with a subtle twist
Who: Justin Helms (and brother Joe)
Hometown: Martinsville, Virginia

Conclusion
After all the negative hype we'd heard about waterborne paint, we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use. It was easy to spray and covered very well. We especially liked the easy cleanup and near absence of toxic fumes filling up our shop. Trust us, give waterborne a chance-you'll like the stuff.

Thanks To The Chassis Guy
Chuck Goupil of North Tonawanda, New York, walked away from this high-speed accident during the final round of qualifying for Top Sportsman at the IHRA Canadian Nationals.

Bob Phelps
Addison, MI
Bob Phelps keeps his toy shop barely a stone's throw from bucolic Devil's Lake in the Irish Hills of southern Michigan. He has been flogging cars for a while now. He won the A/Sports class trophy run at the '62 NHRA U.S. Nationals in Indy driving a '62 Corvette. Another 40 years later at the '01 Nats, his supercharged AA/A '63 Corvette took Competition Eliminator. Bob likes trick street machines, too. He currently keeps around 50 of them handy at all times, split between his two shops--one in Michigan and the other in Florida. He's mainly into Chevrolets but will allow his head to be turned by a Willys gasser or a sharp '49 Merc.

One of the biggest unwritten rules with this magazine is we avoid the Corvette. The Chevy market is divided into Corvettes--and everything else. For this reason, as well as the expense issue, we have mostly avoided edit on the plastic fantastic. But we're going to break our own rules for this story, and we'd ask that you set aside your biases and open your mind to a different idea. We're about to take you on a quick flight through what has to be the best deal in performance cars on the planet--the C4 Corvette. For those of you who don't speak Vette, the C4 moniker represents the '84 through '96 fourth-generation cars, and we're going to place our emphasis on the '84 through '91s as being the best buys. Take a quick stroll through Craigslist in your region and we guarantee you can find several examples for less than $5,000. We also came up with this bit of coercion: Pick your favorite car. Let's say for argument's sake it's a '69 Camaro. How much would you have to spend to outfit that car with EFI, independent rear suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, forged-aluminum suspension components, rack-and-pinion steering, an overdrive transmission, 16-inch aluminum wheels, and a host of other goodies all packaged in a car that weighs roughly 3,300 pounds? The answer is you'd spend a hell of a lot more than $5,000. The most stripped-down base model C4 Corvette, regardless of year, has all the above equipment. Some of it may need a little help, and other pieces might be better off taking up residence on the shop floor, but if you strip a C4 to its bare essentials, you have the makings of a kick-ass street/track car. That's what this story is all about.

There are guys out there who will drop $15,000 on a rusted-out '67 Camaro body, but we don't want to know them. Our friends usually think more and spend less when it comes to scoring fast and cool. We can take advantage of cash-drained times like these, as hoarders of muscle car-era sheetmetal are sometimes forced to lighten their loads to pay for mortgages, alimonies, or their next tender. That opens the door for guys with a little less coin to get in on some sweet deals on project fodder if they know what they're looking at. As the prices for the really good stuff drops, pressure is applied to the dork who thinks his '80 wagon is worth 10K, making market prices dip there as well. So flash your cash at some of these prime pickin's.

We've done an article like this before. Longtime readers, go to your archives and dig up the Mar. '99 issue of CC to see the inspiration for this iteration. In it, former staffer Miles Cook and his brother, Wayne, hit as many local cruises as they could in a week's time and lived to tell the tale.

She claimed it runs 10.38 at 127 mph on a 235 radial, yet only makes 300 naturally aspirated horsepower. We thought it crazy but witnessed it ourselves when Mary Bourdy clicked off a few 10-second shots in the 10.60 index class at the season opener of the Pacific Street Car Association (PSCA) at the The Strip in Vegas.

Finding a Corvette in the junkyard is a rare event because every single trinket has higher-than-average value on the used parts scene-nothing goes to waste. Plus, their plastic bodywork limits maximum scrap value 'cause beyond the frame, there just isn't much ferrous material onboard. So let's meet only the second Corvette ever to be featured in the Junkyard Crawl. It's an '81 model we discovered at Desert Valley Auto Parts in Phoenix (dvap.com; 800/905-8024). Its stripped condition hints it fell prey to the crew from midnight auto supply, a perpetual threat to Corvettes everywhere. Fame has its price.

Late-model engines such as the GM Gen III/IV, Ford Mod motors, and the late-model Mopar Hemi have become the new darlings of horsepower seekers. These engines have strong cylinder blocks, excellent heads, and durable valvetrains. They also are significantly different from the muscle car-era small- and big-block engines. None of these engines use a distributor, preferring instead to rely on the much more accurate distributorless ignition systems (DIS). These engines also now drive the oil pump directly off the crankshaft. While this improves pump efficiency and reduces load on the camshaft, it also eliminates the time-honored technique of using a dummy distributor drive to pressure-lube a new engine before it starts for the first time. Since pressure-lubing a new engine is such a good idea, we had to find a new way to accomplish this.

Go to Google maps right now and search CA-35. California Highway 35, better known as Skyline Boulevard, is a wickedly twisty road loaded with complex corners, elevation changes, and on clear days, breathtakingly beautiful views of the San Francisco Bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It spans 56 miles, running roughly north to south along the western ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Hydraulic Roller Lifters
In the late '80s, Chevy altered the small-block Chevy with a one-piece rear main seal and also reconfigured the lifter valley area of the block to allow the use of hydraulic roller lifters. While GM retooled the small-block to attain slightly better fuel economy, car crafters have for years taken advantage of hydraulic roller cams for their performance advantages. Dart added this feature to its SHP block with all the production bosses in the lifter valley to retain the OE hydraulic roller lifters, along with milling the tops of all the lifter bosses so the OE retainers would seat properly. The front of the block is also machined for a factory hydraulic roller cam retainer plate. This means the block will require the factory-style nose on a hydraulic roller cam, so you don't have to waste time setting up camshaft endplay with a cam button. The lifter bosses are also taller to give more lateral support to the lifter, something that is lacking with older production blocks that are converted to hydraulic roller lifters. Of course, if you prefer to run a flat-tappet cam, the SHP block will also handle that with ease.

We were in the right place at the right time in Pomona, California, at the season-opening NHRA Kragen O'Reilly Winternationals. John Irving provided the first moment of excitement of the season after only three pairs of cars had run in the Stock class. As soon as Irving hit the throttle in his Dodge stocker, the studs on the left rear tire sheared and launched him in the direction of the Tree. Irving's truck climbed into the Tree before landing on the barrier and severely damaging the driver door and the side of the vehicle. The activities of the morning were halted for almost an hour as track personnel replaced the Tree and cleared the debris created by shattered bulbs and wiring along with a few pieces of Mopar. For Irving, it was a very early end to his weekend and his first national event of the season.

Dave Weber
Martinsville, VA
What happens to really good engine builders after they have tired of the rat race of competition? Longtime wrench Dave Weber sort of retired (to just 80 hours a week) on a horse farm in Virginia, where he found he couldn't shake the machinery bug and has recently started Modern Muscle, a company that is doing turnkey conversions on vintage Mopar iron to late-generation Hemi power. Dave was well known in NHRA Division 1 for years as part of the Ritter-Weber partnership that competed in the Comp ranks in the '80s and '90s. After a follow-up position in the Joey Arrington NASCAR Dodge truck series team as an engine builder/developer and eventually general manager, Dave has now made his expertise available to people wanting that late-model feel in classic iron for the street. Modern Muscle is equipped to handle almost any part of the fabrication required, with a paint booth, CNC milling machinery, and more on the property. Like a moonshine operation, though, he is up in them thar hills of Virginy, so we decided to show you what his place looks like.