It's not every day you meet a guy like David Roemer. Unlike most wannabe bench racers who like to mince words, waste time, and puff up their forum post count with dream mods and half-finished builds, Dave prefers instead to stay dead quiet, tucked well under the radar, working on his '01 Camaro in his modest Newark, New York-based machine shop. In fact, it is partly due to Dave's lack of an ego that he was able to quietly and meticulously build his killer Camaro in less than two years, even with some major setbacks, without anyone even knowing what was happening. To be honest, Dave is so stealthy, we almost missed his Camaro completely, finally catching up with him in the pits of this year's NMCA Xtreme Street race at Bradenton Motorsports Park, which happened to be the car's very first public outing. To give you an idea of Dave's character, when we asked him what his favorite part of the car was, his answer was simply, "1,300 hp."
As you can imagine, a Camaro of this caliber is a tricky thing to build, especially for someone working out of their own machine shop. For Dave, this wasn't technically his first rodeo, although his very first build was only a few years old when he began. "I built a '95 Camaro with a 383 and a 300-shot of nitrous. The car started as a local street car that had been wrecked and rolled twice. It took 40 hours on the frame machine to get the chassis straight. That car had a steel cage that I built, which is very different from something like this one." Of course, going from a 9-second LT1 to an 8-second LSX isn't something that happens over night. It was, in fact, a process that began at the inaugural LSX Shootout in Memphis. "I had been thinking about building a car for the NMCA Xtreme Street class and after the first LSX Shootout I had made up my mind on the powerplant." With the seed planted, Dave set out to find a car.
"I bought my Camaro in Syracuse, New York, at an auction. After reviewing the title it was evident the car originated in Hawaii. I bid on it with the intention to turn it into a race car. I bought it in the fall of '07 and began the project of transforming it in the fall of '08." What Dave took home was a fairly decent '01 Camaro, but it certainly needed to come a long way to meet his standards. "This is the first 25.5 car I have ever built ... we just took it step-by-step and it came together nicely." He began by tearing the entire car down to its shell; scrapping all of the stock parts and cutting weight in any area where he wouldn't need it. Once apart, Dave and his friends began bending and welding in the cage, which served as the foundation of the entire build. With the monkey bars in place, Dave turned his attention to the suspension and drivetrain. Beginning up front, Dave installed a BMR tubular K-member along with a matching pair of upper and lower control arms, suspended by a set of QA1 coilover shocks. Knowing that he was going to make some serious horsepower, Dave opted to ditch the factory motor mounts, deciding instead to install the motor between a set of plates to eliminate flex. Out back, Dave kept the rear suspension hooked up in the stock locations but upgraded every component with heavy-duty pieces.