Oftentimes, one of the most interesting parts of a race car is the story of where it came from. You hear about barn finds and divorce sales, but in the hard-core racing world, you almost never hear mention of someone's mother getting them going. For Dave Fiscus, one of the top TSO drag racers in the country, his story is even more interesting than that. "I first fell in love with the Turbo Buick idea in high school, but at the time I could never afford to buy one. During my senior year, I convinced my mother to buy one, hoping she would get tired of it quickly and give it to me. It didn't quite work out that way; she ended up running 12.20s in it and loved racing it. I finally conned her into buying it in 1990, but I couldn't get it from her until 1992." Once Dave finally had the car in his possession, he turned to the streets to start having some fun. "I made a lot of changes the first year I had the car. I added a DFI, a big front-mount, and upgraded the turbo, along with some other good mods. I would street race it nearly every weekend and won a lot of races with it that way. I lost some too, but mainly came out on top." In '95, after three years of daily driving and racing his car, disaster struck when someone attempted to steal Dave's '86 Grand National. "They managed to get the car out of the parking lot, but when they went to turn on to the main road the steering wheel locked. I guess that made them angry, since they keyed the entire car with a screwdriver before leaving. It was horrible."
With his pride and joy in shambles, Dave did what any self-respecting car guy would have done. He stripped off all of the old paint and laid six coats of PPG 9000 Black over the perfect GN sheetmetal, thinking of this unfortunate event as an opportunity to upgrade instead of giving up. After checking out the fresh paint, Dave also decided that it was time to get the Buick off the streets and onto the track. "My friend had a 10-second Grand National and he decided to upgrade to some new heads. I wanted to one-up him, so I bought a set of Stage 2s and we went racing. After that, it just kind of snowballed. In 1997 I decided to get serious and built my first Stage 2 motor. It has been a money pit ever since."
Fast forward to 2006, when Dave turned to RPE Machine in Connecticut to build him an engine that would be highly competitive in the TSO class. For those of you who don't follow the world of Buick racing, TSO is one of the craziest classes in existence, which constantly pushes the limits of the turbo Buick scene. In '06, TSO was barely even a real class, but Dave saw what a few others did and knew that it would grow quickly. To make sure he stayed on top, Dave chose to use a TA aluminum block, which RPE set up around a Crower billet crankshaft and a set of matching Crower rods. Atop those beefy rods, RPE hung a set of JE pistons, which were built to handle as much boost and fuel as Dave could throw at them. "Honestly, to this day I have over 300 runs on the rotating assembly."