Chris Lunsford at Sheppard Race Cars in nearby Covington, GA, got the call to check out and rescale the car’s full-tube, chrome-moly chassis and perform some fabrication work. Originally built as an all-steel bracket warrior, the Camaro now has a complete carbon-fiber front end, doors, deck lid and passenger-side floorboard, with aluminum wheel tubs and sheet-metal interior.
Lunsford also helped fit headers on the 468 cubic-inch, big-block Chevy engine. A lone four-barrel Holley 850 meters fuel along with a single-stage, 175-horsepower nitrous shot. “It’s just our basic shop motor,” Ghee says, “a real boat anchor.”
The refurbished ride made its race debut in the mid-summer heat at an unsanctioned 5.30 race at Macon (GA) National Dragway, then ran its first ORSCA event in July at Atlanta Dragway. With a new 540 c.i. BBC with twin stages of nitrous going in shortly, the 5.0 class feels like a more natural fit to Ghee.
“We struggled a bit to run 5.30s with the motor that’s in there now,” he admits. “So we felt the need to make a change and the new motor will make us very consistent and I think a threat to win in the 5.0 class.”
After Lamar Walden did the machine work, Ghee and Garner are building the new engine themselves. They plan to test the upgraded combination at Carolina Dragway by mid-February in preparation for a run at the full ORSCA 5.0 schedule in 2008, plus appearances at select 5.30 outlaw races. To slow the car down, “we’ll just change the timing and leave on one (nitrous) system instead of two,” Ghee explains. “Backing it down is easy; it’s speeding up that costs so much.”
Ghee encountered some engine heat-related issues last season that led him to change the entire cooling system twice, but says he’s confident “we’ve finally got it whipped this time around.” Part of the fix came from opening up the car’s nose and installing a factory grill, but Ghee reveals that was just a happy coincidence.
“When I first got the car it was very pretty, but it just didn’t have the appeal in the front end that I wanted. I like my car to look like it’s a factory car, so all year long my goal was to cut out the front, put a factory grill in, headlights, parking lights and Rally Sport bumpers on it. So at the end of last year’s ORSCA race season that was the main job I wanted to do. And it turned out just like I thought it would; it changed the car a hundred percent, I think, and it sure can’t hurt to get that extra air in there.”
Jeremy Black at Southern Style Customs in Snellville, GA, made all the cosmetic changes while Ghee did the wiring himself.
