"Go ahead and launch off the limiter. If it breaks, we have other engines."
When I sleep I dream. And when I dream, Nebraska has won another national football title, my crappy on-street parking has turned into a big garage, and Jessica Alba and Shakira keep dropping by to belly dance. And of course, there's lots of unconscious tire smoke. Memories of road-racing C5s, with the occasional off-track nightmare. Visions of past top-speed runs in mid-America. Drag races that I won while awake are lost in dreamland, and vise-versa. I've piloted a Top Fueler, smacked the wall a million times during our track days, beaten Bob Falfa at Paradise Road. I've even been a test-driver for a big company with deep pockets and a who-cares attitude toward broken parts.
It was deja vu with that last one this August. I was at Milan Dragway with the GM Performance Parts crew, strip testing its LS7-swap Camaro for an upcoming article. I'd spent the afternoon shaking down the flat-black Fourth Gen on street tires, and with night approaching we'd swapped them for a set of slicks. It was toward the end of the Wednesday night test and tune session, and I was killing time in the lanes by asking several of the principals their opinions on how hard I should leave for the last pass. GMHTP pulls no punches with test vehicles, but the Camaro's clutch and trans had acted up during the street tire runs. I'd gotten decent ETs earlier on radials, and would have been happy to go easy with the slicks, leave around four grand, and give the F-body back to GM in one piece. But in response to my launch-rpm query, a GMPP bigwig tossed the above response my way.
Naturally, I was floored: It isn't every day that GM invites me up to Michigan to drag test its experimental toys. And I wasn't testing some clapped-out 350 with a five grand redline, this was the LS7: 427 ci and 7,200 rpm of dry-sumped GM wizardry, shoehorned into a '99 Z28 hardtop and fitted with a custom-calibrated MEFI-4b ECU. The price? You can buy multiple cars for the coin needed to take an LS7 crate engine home. Nice cars. I didn't care how many rows upon rows of LS7 crate engines I'd seen the day before at GM Racing headquarters--15 grand is 15 grand! So I pondered that response for a bit: did a GM employee really just say that to me?
I spent that entire week in Detroit as a guest of GM Performance Parts, and although the LS7 strip test was the high point, almost everything I did and saw gave it a run for the money. I sat in on some meetings, was given a tech presentation on some future products that you'll go nuts over, got my hands on some really crazy historical bits and pieces, drove some cool cars, and generally got a good sense of how this division of GM works-lots more on this next issue.
What impressed me most, however, was the GMPP staff. Too often these days, companies thrust people into positions who have no business being there. This is all-too-apparent in the magazine world, where hot new lifestyle magazines have to be everything to everyone-but money grubbing publishers retain staffs of just-graduated 24-year-olds with little experience and expect works of journalistic art. A recent automotive feature from a popular men's lifestyle mag is a good example: this story boasted of "testing" a slew of exotic cars, but consisted of cheesy, photoshopped images and vague descriptions. It was clear that these non-car guys didn't come within 100 feet of the rides they were so desperately trying to write about, and wouldn't have had a clue what to do if they had. Pretty sad. The same thing goes for the auto biz these days: in the age of the agency there are lots of talking heads around, and once you get past the PR-speak, you find just another corporate minion who's out of his league.
But with the GMPP folks, after the polite introductions and get-to-know-you conversations were through, the bench racing started in earnest. And to be honest with you, I was floored by how perfect they were for the job. You'd be surprised by how hard it is for me to find employees that are educated, talented writers, and into late-model GMs-I'll bet it's the same situation for GM when GMPP is concerned. Like us, we're talking niche within a niche. But nonetheless, I was surrounded by people with master's degrees and Ph.D.s who would much rather be bangin' gears than banging out theses. These guys and girls work long and hard, go to the track, and substitute racing for sleep. They spend too much money on cars, and eat way too much track food. Simply put, they walk the walk. And best of all, they work at a job where their passions-and GM's considerable resources-can combine to invent and produce the type of performance parts the likes of which have never been seen in this industry. I'm happy to conclude that not only are they a competent, focused bunch, they are as passionate about hardcore GM performance as I am.
Be sure to pick up the February issue of GMHTP, when we go in-depth with GM Performance Parts and reveal some truly sick pieces for your late-model GM performer that are coming around the bend. Oh, and that last track launch? Seven grand, baby.