Car Feature 2000 Camaro SS
"It took everything I had to not punch him in the face. We took the car, the pieces of the motor, and all the spare parts, loaded them in the trailer and left. That was over two years ago, it has been a long road." Like any great adventure, Bobby Lashley's quest for an 8-second, all-motor race car is filled with heartache and joy, defeat and eventually, victory. To fully understand just how far this car has come, we need to start at the beginning, when this 2000 Camaro was a bone stock daily driver, driven by Bobby's son Morgan Lashley.
Bought as a brand-new Navy Blue Metallic, six-speed car, it wasn't long before the modifications began. As is almost inevitable, Morgan first installed a budget-friendly heads/cam combination and, accidentally, re-kindled his father's addiction to drag racing. After a spun rod bearing mishap, the father-and-son team commissioned Allan Futral, of Futral Motorsports, to help build an all-bore 396. With the new motor, the two found themselves at the track running mid 10s and having a blast. With the safety of his son in mind, Bobby installed a rollcage, which really ended Morgan's chances of taking the car out on dates. "Morgan could no longer drive it on the street, so I traded him my '03 Z06, so that I could finish what I started." And of course that meant trading the 396 for a C5R-where the real adventure began.
"I had always wanted to build one of the fastest LSx-based cars that I could. Being N/A also posed a great challenge. It is easy to go fast with nitrous or a turbo, it takes time to do it N/A, but what a thrill!" As time would tell, making an 8-second pass in an all-motor C5R proved to be much harder than expected. "The first builder really didn't know enough about the C5R engine and it cost me a lot of time and money." According to Bobby, the first engine barely even ran before melting an entire set of pistons on the dyno. Determined to see the project to completion, Bobby picked up the mess and started over. The second engine did, in fact, make it off the dyno and to the dragstrip, where it made a dismal and depressing couple of passes. It was two weeks later, on the dyno, where it finally put a rod through the oil pan, taking all of the pistons and the block with it. This is where most people would call it quits. For Bobby, it just meant he had to work harder.
With the car and broken parts loaded in the trailer, Bobby drove to Woodstock, GA, to have the crew at Pro Line Race Engines assemble a motor wild enough to finally get him into the 8-second zone. Starting with a brand-new C5R block, Pro Line selected a standard 4.000-inch Callies crankshaft to handle the severe punishment in the bottom end. In charge of keeping the rotating assembly from exiting the block (for a third time) Pro Line installed a set of billet aluminum Bill Miller connecting rods, which ride on a set of ACL bearings. The billet rods connect to a set of custom-built Diamond pistons, which are wrapped in Total Seal rings. These pistons, along with the ported C5R cylinder heads, gave Pro Line a final compression ratio of 15:1, perfect for their goals.