We take our recently revamped 1970 Camaro to Indiana and Illinois for Autocross, Road Race and Speed Stop Challenge action.
You can tell car show season is in full swing – we just got back from an action packed weekend of muscle car racing in the midwest, and we leave again tomorrow for the 2010 Hot Rod Power Tour!
We spent Memorial Day Weekend at the Midwest Muscle Car Challenge, where we sponsored the Speed by Spectre Top Speed Challenge and competed with our 1970 Camaro SS. The first stop on our trip was to pick up the Camaro from our friends at RideTech in Jasper, Indiana on Friday and give it a little tune-up. We recently had Hotchkis Performance install its latest Total Vehicle System, then we had our own crew install a new set of Baer brakes, new lightweight forged Weld Wheels and most importantly a new set of Yokohama Advan Neova 180-treadware high performance tires. We had to patch up a few little issues on the rack, so our friend Greg Schneider was on site to help by fixing a hole in the exhaust with some custom welding.
After leaving RideTech, we caravanned to our hotel where we enjoyed a beautiful Indiana evening checking out cars and barbecuing with a few of the event sponsors and competitors in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn.
The first leg of the race on Saturday was held at beautiful Putnam Park Road Course in Greencastle, Indiana. Not only is the infield at Putnam nothing but rolling green hills as far as the eye can see, but the track staff was on top of their game making sure everything ran smoothly.
The Spectre team was involved in keeping track of fastest racers down the front straightaway as part of the Spectre Top Speed Challenge. The winner of Top Speed Challenge was Brian Finch in his amazing yellow 1970 Camaro with a top speed of 125 mph that he set on the second to last lap of the day. Brian has been destroying the competition in every event he enters lately, winning both the Run to the Coast and the Optima Faceoff leading up to this race.
After a day at the track we made our way with the rest of the participants on a 99 mile cruise to a park in Vincennes, Indiana to enjoy a rib feast in the park sponsored by Flowmaster. It was a great opportunity to chat with other event sponsors and get to know the diehard racers and pro-touring fans.
After a barbecue induced food coma, we woke up Sunday morning to head down the road to the RideTech Street Challenge autocross and the Baer Brakes Speed Stop Challenge at the Mid-American Air Center in Lawrenceville, Illinois. The autocross course was set up on an old WWII airfield and if you closed your eyes you could almost imagine that the rumbling V8s were warplanes instead of muscle cars.
There was quite a selection of cars on site with everything from Chevelles, Camaros, Tempests and even Greg in the Ride Tech C-10 Pickup. Competitors put the pedal to the metal at the Speed Stop Challenge and used every piston of those calipers to make their big muscle machines stop within the box.
The overall winner of the entire event was – you guessed it – Brian Finch, who took home the overall trophy and a certificate for a Spectre ProFab Intake. Our own Camaro ran really well, and our friend Robert McGaffin – who shoots photos for magazines like Popular Hot Rodding and Camaro Performers – spent a lot of time in the car doing hot laps and having a great time learning how to throttle-induce oversteer to power the green 2nd gen around the course. Overall, the race was a success and everyone had a blast pushing their vehicles to the limit.
We’ll have video from the race soon. In the meantime, look for the new Spectre rig on Power Tour 2010! You can get the directions here.
