Fast Tracking

In a Hobby Where Projects Take Years to Get Done We Knock One Out in a Mere Seven Days

- Steven Rupp

Most of the time project cars take a long time to get done. Why? Well, as we’ve opined before sometimes it’s time and sometimes it’s money. The more you have of either of those (or better, both of those) the faster your project will go from neurons firing in your grey matter to reality. Of course, starting with a decent car can get you from point A to point Z a whole lot faster, too. We’ve done this dance before so when we decided to tackle another Week To Wicked project—the deal where we take a stockish ride and transform it into a bad mama jamma in just seven days—we knew the starting car couldn’t be a basket case. After all, it’s lovingly (well, not really) referred to as paint jail for a reason, so the search began for a Camaro that was mostly stock, but fully body worked and painted. Eventually our odyssey led usto a Hugger Orange ’72 Camaro project that had stalled out shortly after getting painted. Going by the smoothed-out and body-colored firewall, we’re pretty sure it wasn’t going to be restored. This was especially evident when we crawled under the car and spied cubic meters of more orange paint. The best part about this is that we could tell the floors were solid along with the rest of the car. As a bonus there wasn’t a smidgen of grime anywhere and the front subframe had been cleaned up and powder coated black.

In the negative column was the fact that the Camaro was missing its drivetrain and interior, and had a 4-inch cowl hood that fit like OJ’s glove. But it was a solid car in a great color so we dragged it back to our shop where Jason Scudellari, our tech center manager, could start figuring out what was missing. We typically start Week To Wicked projects with a complete, running car so first up was dropping in a spare drivetrain and getting the Camaro to a stockish state. After all, it would be cheating a bit if we pushed a stripped-down sh