A small and light Model Motoring body fitted with a shockingly fast light brown Auto World Ultra G chassis and contacting the road with Vincent “Steel” wheels shod with Road Race Replicas full sized silicone tires is going to make this new addition one to watch-and one to beat-at the track this season!
Camaros, Camaros, Camaros! I’m not even that much of a Camaro fan, and yet I swear there are more of them than any other car in my muscle car fleet. Probably not hard to figure out why: as Chevy’s answer to the Mustang, many muscle fans think of the Camaro as the ultimate pony car: small, light, nimble, great looking, and capable of carrying any engine Chevrolet ever made, its hard not to love a car that’s so versatile and so easy to live with.
But even amongst the endless variety of Camaros there are those that are extra-special and stand out, and that would include anything touched by the tuning shop of Don Yenko, the famous Pennsylvania Chevy dealer who’s pull with the GM “COPO” program allowed him to sell some of the harriest, scariest cars of the muscle era: cars so powerful that GM would not “officially” build them for public consumption!
These cars are very rare, so it would take a lot of balls to throw one around a racing track. From this we can infer that Michigander Mitch “The Magician” McFadden has quite a set on him, since that’s exactly what he’s doing! Another of Drag City’s newcomers in the “Graybeard” category of drivers just over 50, McFadden has been around the muscle car scene since his boyhood, and he’s the second owner of this rare car, which he acquired from the original owner in suburban Chicago in 1974 for a price we would roll our eyes at today, which is why we have to temper our shock when we find out that shortly after his acquisition of the car, he ditched the original TH400 automatic to replace it with a Muncie M22 “Rock Crusher!” We may be aghast at such changes today, but in the mid ‘70’s it seemed logical, especially for someone who wanted to leave the dragstrip for the road course (fortunately McFadden swears he still has the original tranny in his possession in working order!)
Value aside, any driver would have to have balls of steel to even drive one of these monstrosities, let alone race it: equipped with Chevrolet’s biggest contemporary engine-the hulking 427 big block built to L78 specs and packing 425 HP, McFadden has modified it even further with a custom made Clay Smith camshaft and a 800 cfm Carter AFB on a high-rise aluminum manifold with MSD electronic ignition. Sway bars, Bilstine shocks and disc brakes at all four corners try to keep all this under control, but since this beast is pushing 500 horsepower, it’s a handful all but the steeliest of drivers would find challenging; that’s how “The Magician” got his name.
As for the Camaro’s nom de plume, he has called it “Venom” ever since he bought it, so now DC’s more seasoned drivers are checking their mirrors nervously to make sure they don’t fall pray to the bite of the infamous Yenko!