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Quick Inspection: '66 Corvette * Brent Jarvis * Mundelein, IL

Powertrain

Engine: Overkill comes in the form of 555 ci from a Callies 4.25-inch-stroke crank in a Donovan block with a 4.560-inch bore. CP forged pistons squeeze 10.75:1 compression into Dart 320cc rectangle-port heads with 119cc chambers and 2.25/1.90-inch valves worked by an Erson 4-7 swap solid-roller with 267/275 degrees duration at 0.050 and 0.762/0.731-inch lift on a 112 LSA. The icing on the cake is a Hilborn individual- runner intake manifold with eight 2.5-inch throttle-bodies controlled by a Carabine Alpha-N fuel-injection controller. An MSD distributor and 6AL control the spark, and wasted fumes are expelled through 2-to-21/8-inch stepped primary headers with 3-inch merge collectors and 3-inch exhaust with Flowmasters.

Power: On 93 octane it made 748 hp at 6,800 rpm and 698 lb-ft at 5,200 rpm, "and I never really finished tuning it," Jarvis says. Quoth Stielow: "It's a little over the top for a road-race car."

Transmission: A Richmond six-speed with a 3.27:1 First gear and a McLeod dual-disc clutch and aluminum flywheel are mounted with a Lakewood scattershield.

Rearend: It's a Dana 44 center from a '96 C4 Corvette with 3.07:1 gears and a limited-slip differential.

Chassis

Frame: The custom frame was built by Wheel-to-Wheel Powertrain in Warren, Michigan.

Suspension: The front upper and lower control arms and spindles are direct from a C5 Corvette with 500 lb/in Carrera coilovers and 1.25-inch adjustable sway bar and a C4 Corvette power rack-and-pinion. Alignment is set at -1.5 degrees camber, 6.5 degrees caster and 0.125-inch toe-out. In the rear, the IRS from a C4 Corvette was narrowed 10 inches and installed with QA1 coilover shock with 250 lb/in springs, a 3/4-inch adjustable sway bar, and custom tie-rods and camber rods. Rear alignment is set at -0.3 degrees camber and 0.125-inch toe-in.

Brakes: Baer 13-inch rotors are on the front and rear along with C5 dual-piston calipers on all four corners with front and rear ducts. An adjustable proportioning valve and friction-biased brake pads miraculously balance the system out despite the seeming piston area mismatch.

Wheels & Tires: 17x9 Colorado Customs Empire two-piece welded billet wheels on the front, with 18x12s on the rear. Tires are Michelin Pilot Sports P265/40ZR17 front and P345/35ZR18s rear.

Style

Body: Brent wrecked the original car on a slippery road the morning of September 11, 2001. After it sat for a year he decided to rebuild it into a show car, but first he had to restore the body to stock just to get everything straight.

Paint: Brent applied the twenty-six coats of PPG custom orange base, pearls, and candies himself at his shop, Performance Restorations, in Mundelein, Illinois. The recipe is top secret.

Interior: There's a six-point rollbar and leather upholstered RCI bucket seats stitched by Danny's Glass and Trim of Island Lake, Illinois.



For years we've said that Pro Touring is becoming too much like Pro Street. Big-inch wheels framing pizza-pan brakes with sway bars thick enough to hold a dump truck flat through a corner remind us an awful lot of the days when an 8-71 through the hood, a four-link, and 16-inch-wide Sportsman Pros signaled the high probability that a car couldn't actually make a quarter-mile pass if it tried, let alone one worthy of all the bolt-on hardware. Most Pro Touring cars strike us the same way, even if we do find the look infinitely more tasteful. The typical Pro Touring machine with the latest C5 Corvette-derived front suspension, 18-inch Fikses, and 14-inch rotors with more pistons than engine cylinders certainly talks the talk, but can it walk the walk? We suspect most can't.

Just like back in the early '90s when HOT ROD pioneered the Fastest Street Car shootouts that separated the men from the poseurs on the dragstrip, we think it's high time we did the same thing for Pro Touring. Sure, our little brother Car Craft has done something similar with its on-again/off-again Real Street Eliminator, but we're talking about something less like a Motor Trend road test and more like the Pump Gas Drags. Just like the ultimate test of a Pro Street car is how fast it runs on a dragstrip, the ultimate Pro Touring test is how fast a car can hustle around a legit road course, not a pile of cones in a parking lot or cruising the interstate on Power Tour(TM).

We haven't worked out the details yet, but to get started on the concept, we're throwing down the gauntlet right now with the help of Brent Jarvis and his big-block '66 Corvette. As you'll see, if Brent was willing to thrash his mega-dollar show car, which he estimates cost about 200 grand to build including labor, at Road America and GingerMan Raceway, there's no excuse for anybody else not to do the same. This Pro Touring Corvette talks a big game, and as we'll prove here, it also plays it.

We started kicking around the idea when Jarvis, who has a 30-year background in drag racing and restoration, pitched us an idea for a new project he'd just completed. After competing and judging for several years on the indoor car show circuit and at some of the earliest HOT ROD Fastest Street Car shootouts, Brent wanted to take a crack at the open track. Our initial plans were to meet him at the Derek Daly Driving Academy in Las Vegas right before this year's SEMA show, but when that fell through, we instead made last-minute plans to convene at GingerMan Raceway in South Haven, Michigan, about midway between Brent's Performance Restorations shop in the northern suburbs of Chicago and our Midwest base in Ann Arbor. But we had a scheme to get more than just a car feature out of the rendezvous. We invited a hotshoe driver to wheel Jarvis's Corvette around the 1.8-mile, 11-turn circuit and report back just how capable it really was. After all, anyone can putt around a road course at five tenths and hang the tail end out a couple of times for the camera, but what does that really prove other than that the steering wheel works?

Our expert witness was GM Performance Division Development Engineer Mark Stielow, who's no stranger to the Pro Touring scene. In fact, he can be credited as one of the movement's founders and leading practitioners. The first-gen Camaros Mark built over the years are legendary, perhaps second only to RJ Gottlieb's Big Red in the pantheon of Pro Touring. Starting with his first effort, a white '69 Camaro that HOT ROD featured in the early '90s, his many success stories include The Red Witch, The Thrasher, and most recently The Mule, which was ogled from stem to stern in our sister publication Popular Hot Rodding. Along the way he entered his cars in Car & Driver's grueling One Lap of America no less than five times, so Mark knows a thing or two about truly thrashing musclecars around a road course. After stints in the aftermarket at Summit Racing, Trick Flow, and Banks Engineering, Mark returned to General Motors six years ago and joined the Performance Division when it was formed in 2002. In his current role, Mark's responsibilities include chassis development and tuning on cars like the Saturn Ion Redline coupe and the Cadillac STS-V sport sedan. He's one of the elite few Level 3 drivers at GM who have the studly honor of taking the wheel when the Performance Division tests at Germany's Nurburgring, where's he's made six trips just in the past year.

Despite conferring with Brent every day for more than a week prior to our track day in an effort to coordinate a rainless test session, we were unprepared for the shock that was in store when we finally laid eyes on his Corvette. We were not expecting a full-on show car to roll out of his enclosed trailer into the paddock at GingerMan. The quality of the paint and level of detail throughout this car is spectacular and worthy of any indoor car show. It's so far beyond the level of anything we'd ever expect to see taken around a road course that we can't even describe how out of place it seemed among the ratty race cars and track cars at GingerMan's end-of-the-season Tailgate Party last October. And we stared in bug-eyed disbelief when Brent opened the hood to reveal a 750hp, 555ci Hilborn-injected big-block with enough chrome and polish to shame a lowrider.

"This is what it was built to do," Brent insisted as we pondered the custom-mixed candy-orange paint, imagining the imminent pounding it could soon be taking from gravel, tire debris, and other potential on-track calamities. We also had our doubts about the ability of anyone, regardless of the temperature of his shoes, to herd 750 horses around a road course in a chassis as ancient as that of a '66 Corvette, even one upgraded with front architecture grafted on from the fifth-generation C5 model.

To get familiar with the track, Brent rode shotgun in an '06 Corvette Z06 with Mark at the wheel, then hit the course in his own Corvette. A few laps later we feared the worst when the Vette pulled back into the paddock with a smoke plume billowing from its undercarriage. Fortunately, it turned out to be oil leaking from the valve cover breathers, a common problem with cars that have never experienced high lateral loads before. Under sustained high-rpm operation, oil is pumped up to the top end of the engine faster than it can drain back, and it sloshes out of the breathers during high-speed corners. Brent and his crew drained a quart of oil and wrapped rags around the breathers to try to alleviate the problem. That helped a little, but the problem got progressively worse as Mark and Jarvis made other adjustments that increased their speed around the track.

After the first short session, we asked Mark what he thought about the Corvette's setup. "It's understeering in steady-state turns and hitting the jounce bumpers in the rear, causing it to snap oversteer," he said. "Right now the dynamic stiffness is higher in the front than in the rear, which is a good place to start with that car." Mark suggested checking to make sure there was enough jounce travel in the rear suspension to ensure it wasn't bottoming out under compression, causing the effective rear spring rate to increase infinitely--which is usually followed by the car swapping ends--and increasing the compression settings on the adjustable QA1 rear shocks. After the next session, although still hampered by the oil-breather problem, Mark added 4 psi air pressure to the rear tires to bring them up to 32 psi cold, matching the static pressure of the fronts and helping to decrease understeer by reducing rear grip.

He suggested improvements, including fixing the heavy front-brake bias, reworking the linkage for the eight individual-runner Hilborn throttle-bodies to allow a more-progressive throttle application, and fixing the oil-breather issue, but at the end of the day after several sessions behind the wheel, Mark deemed the Corvette "surprisingly good. This is standard vehicle integration stuff. But it's a pretty well-engineered car."

"That's why we're here, to find these things out," Jarvis replied. "We're taking baby steps. But we'll go back and fix those things and be ready for the next time out."

It's hard to say what we found more shocking at the conclusion of the track testing of Jarvis's Corvette; that he had the ***** to put such a valuable car at so much risk on a road course, or that a such a beautiful showpiece ultimately performed so well. We've seen so many cars that could hardly idle out of a trailer onto a show stand that it was almost inconceivable that Jarvis got it so right on the first try.

Consider this a glove slap to the face of every Pro Touring wannabe out there who talks the talk without walking the walk. We're calling you out. Time and place to be named later, but it looks like it'll happen this summer. Brent Jarvis will be there. And he has a big head start. Who has the stones to come out and play? We'll see.

 
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Pictures

 
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beautiful vette

 
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wicked restoration job!

 
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I think I've seen that car... In my dreams!