1976 Chevy Camaro - Project g/28 Part 6

Jason trial-fits the bracket to the universal pedestal mount in preparation for installing the seat. You can see the cutouts along the bottom of the square tubing. This is to make room for the bulge of the floor that cuts into the useable room. Even though it fit perfectly, we ended up scrapping this bracket for one made entirely of flat stock--there just isn't enough headroom in the car.

With the new Jeg's seat installed we had the extra support we needed. We'll put in a four-point harness later when we tie the chassis in with a rollbar and subframe connectors.

Right off the street, g/28 stopped from 60 mph in just 112.7 feet, as measured by Nick Licata, our radar operator and photographer. The braking result was so good, Nick thought it was an equipment malfunction. Subsequent tests with our Stalker 9000 radar backed the number up though.

At the 200-foot skidpad we pulled an aggregate of .94g, even though we experienced incipient understeer. With a performance-oriented alignment (we'd like about 1.5 degrees negative camber) and the toe-in set to spec, we can probably go a few hundredths better.

Just before finishing this story we brought g/28 over to Lee Watts at Muffler Man in Placentia, CA (714-524-7818) to begin our exhaust install. We brought him some full-length smog-legal headers from Hedman, a 3-inch catalytic converter from Dynomax, and an assortment of mufflers from Dynomax. The stock exhaust system dyno'd at 177 hp (peak at 3,500 rpm), so there is some serious restriction there.

Next on the to-do list: a beefed up rearend with 3.73 gears and a quick-ratio steering box. With the leftover money we'll tackle some chassis stiffening.

The 420-foot slalom consists of six cone gates set 70 feet apart. Our best runs measured 6.2 seconds, which equates to 46.2 mph. We did not improve on our best slalom (only equaling it twice) due to not having a new wheel alignment and a worn-out steering box. This is a number we feel we can improve upon, even though we already hit our performance target.