18: BUSINESS AS USUAL — CAMARO BUILT TO BURN

LIZ AND RYAN GRACIE’S FAMOUS CAMARO ISN’T YOUR AVERAGE BURNOUT CAR. A LITTLE STREET DRIVING, A BIT OF SHOW, LOADS OF BURNOUTS, AND ALL BUSINESS

Not too many people had ’69 Camaros at the time we got it,” Ryan Gracie recounts of the 18 years since he and partner Liz acquired their now-iconic ‘EV1L69’ Camaro. “We basically said it’s going to be matte black, and we’re gonna blow the back guards off it. We’re gonna treat it how American car owners do not treat their cars. We just beat on it and had fun in it.”

And they have — after however many events across New Zealand, countless sets of destroyed tyres, a few burnout trophies, and competing in burnout competitions through Australia, including Burnout Masters at Summernats, the Camaro is a world away from the hack it once was.

“A mate of mine owned it and was going to work in the mines in Australia, and he couldn’t store it anywhere here, so I looked after it for him,” Ryan reveals of how it came to be. “A few months later, he rung and said, ‘I’m not coming back; you have to buy it off me’ — no. I had a Torana and other cars and didn’t want to, but he said I could pay it

I gave it a duco reco and new frost plugs, Lee at Diffs R Us built a nine-inch, and we bought a TH350 in unknown condition for $240 off Trade & Exchange and got it going. We drove it there, and we cut laps the entire weekend. It was a great weekend until the drive home — we had to do a full intake gasket set on the side of the road.”

Ryan began building a better motor for it in

Rob Penman’s workshop, starting with a Mexican 350 crate engine, and bits off a 400-cube marathon boat motor … but bourbon or boredom intervened.

“I got bored and Lee [Wilson] and I put a blower on and got the 283 going with a boost gauge. We were just gonna see how long it would last,” he remembers. “I’d bought two 650 Mighty Demons, and at twothirds throttle, it was climbing through 12-pounds’ boost; man, did it go good! Those blowers take 100hp to run, but they make a couple hundred — regardless of what people tell you, they work.”

And with that blown kick up the arse, Ryan got the other motor built.

“It took me a year to build,” he says. “Rob made me build it; he didn’t do a single thing except help me dial in the cam. We took it home, and Lee and I fired it up — it was cool, it had a massive solid cam in it. It didn’t have the hunt it’s got now; it just sounded nasty, like a drag car.”

They drove around and beat on the Camaro for seven years with that motor before it blew up — impressive considering that it wasn’t anything too flash; a four-bolt Mexico block with a big marathon boat cam, screw-in studs, ARP fixings, big heads, a decent manifold and MSD ignition, but a stock rotating assembly.

A little rough and ready, but that was how the whole car was supposed to be, and people loved it. It was built to be the car you could sit on, rest your Lion Red bottle on, and just race, roll, and arsehole.

THE CAMARO IS A WORLD AWAY FROM THE HACK IT ONCE WAS

“We were the first to put Sparcos in a car like that, and it’s always been really low with big wheels and brakes, the big, loud exhaust — all the cool shit,” Ryan says. And it’s come a long way since then: the same cool gear, but ‘rough and ready’ doesn’t enter the equation any more.

With their Torana still under construction, and the temporary small block finally grenading seven years later as the Camaro was becoming a serious burnout rig, the replacement motor was built to survive far more abuse than all the small blocks before it.

“I had a fascination with Nascar and had started building a Nascar motor that I wanted blown,” Ryan tells us. “I bought a whole lot of Nascar gear — Sonny Bryant crank, Callies rods, JE pistons out of a Nascar — and got it all home. I took it to Glen at Engine Specialties and he basically asked me what I was doing with it.” The short of the long: none of that gear would do.

“I sold the Nascar gear off. It took months but I managed to sell it all off,” he recounts. “We ended up buying Mahle pistons — Nascars run either JE or Mahle — and we found a real nice Callies crank. I wanted 10,000rpm and Glen said we will never get that, not reliably, blown. We could but we’d have to pull the motor down and replace the crank every season, so we had to compromise.”

The resulting small block is still a damn good compromise, though: think 358 cubes and over 8700rpm. The Dart iron block contains that forged Callies crank and Mahle pistons, a solid cam profiled by Liz and Glen, and massive 242cc Pro Action CNC heads with Jesel rocker gear. Then there’s The Blower Shop (TBS) billet blower manifold, Als Blower Drives 6-71 big-case blower, and twin 750cfm Holley XP E85 carbs pinched off their XA Fairmont featured on the cover of NZV8 Issue No. 136.

Switching to E85 was a decision made in pursuit of power and reliability, and the 750cfm Mighty Demons were swapped onto the XA after years spent at wide-open throttle, but the swap wasn’t without its dramas.

“We found you can’t run E85 on the MSD 6 ignition safely or get maximum gains from the fuel, so we thought we’d step it up to an MSD coil-over-plug, but that just didn’t work,” Ryan explains. “The cam sync wasn’t talking to the crank trigger. We needed a computer to fire it all, and we just got lucky.”

Link ECU, based in Christchurch, was doing shop tours of workshops it supplies in Auckland and happened to come by Engine Specialties while the Camaro was in there.

“The team at Link ECU looked at the car, Glen showed him some videos, and he basically said, ‘Get Liz to give me a call’ — we didn’t have to put forward a proposal; he just said we’d do it.”

The unexpected sponsorship came with a Link Dash2Pro digital dash, Link G4+ Thunder ECU,

and boxes full of every sensor required to do the job properly. Wired up by Chris Revis at R&R Automotive, the spark is now provided by a top-of-the-line M&W Pro Drag8 ignition and eight M&W capacitor discharge ignition (CDI) coils all mounted under the dash.

The fuelling system has also been redesigned entirely, with old braided hoses and fittings replaced with crimped XRP Pro Plus hose, a new Jaz fuel cell and Holley Hydramat, customfabricated GSS 12-litre surge tank, and three Bosch 044 fuel pumps to keep up with the huge demand for fuel that comes with the switch to E85. A complete once-over under the bonnet also presented an opportunity for a total makeover to reflect the Link ECU sponsorship, and Karl Reid at KR Panelbeaters straightened out years of burnout damage for Paul Black at Visign to then wrap it in 3M Satin Flip Psychedelic vinyl with a three-dimensional Link ECU detail cleverly worked into the boot lid. This revamp extended to new LED headlights, with even more of a change up going on inside

— a B&M Pro Bandit ratchet shifter, a new Sparco steering wheel, and Sparco harnesses now complement the brand-new Link digital dash. The downside to all of this work? Well, it did take place over a longer timeframe than Liz and Ryan expected — you can’t rush work this major — meaning that the Camaro was only ready to go right at the end of 2019.

And those in the know will be aware that Liz drove the Camaro to earn a Burnout Masters Golden Ticket at the last season of the New Zealand Burnout Championship (NZBC), giving them the privilege of flying the New Zealand flag at Summernats. Unfortunately, that ship quite literally sailed — the container of Kiwi cars left for Aussie while the Camaro was still in bits — meaning that Liz and Ryan couldn’t show the Aussies a thing or two for a third time in the Camaro. Seeing how well it went over there with the old set-up, this new-andimproved version would no doubt have been up to the task, but there isn’t much point dwelling on what might have been. What is obvious is what the future of the ‘EV1L69’ Camaro holds: a few more street miles, a couple more trophies, and countless more sets of tyres.