Family Values

As I’m sure many of you know I put off the Turbo Dodge Theme Tuesday for as long as possible because it was hard to pull together and I wasn’t sure the juice was worth the squeeze.

However had I known that posting a few snail equipped Mopars would lead to my first introduction to this Stingray I would have done it a hell of a lot sooner.

Before starting the rebuild of this ’72 Corvette with his father Steve Grybel commissioned his friend Chris at Design 165.com to do a few renderings of the projected final product.

Chris just so happens to own a turbo Dodge and left a comment here that lead me to his blog containing said renderings.

As you can imagine after seeing the renderings I was more than a little interested in what the final product would look like and after learning the car debuting at Detroit Autorama I set out looking for photos a week or two after the event.

The first decent shot I found I posted on the fanpage and as luck would have it a few people recognized the car and pointed me to Steve who sent a link to the build thread.

I’m not entirely sure how I missed this thread on a forum in active on, but once I started to read it I only became further impressed with the amount of work put into the car.

Steve didn’t just pick up a clapped out Corvette and put it in the weeds, the car has actually been in his family since new and during the late 80s his dad modified it for the first time.

While the car looked very period correct Steve figured with a little mini truck influence it could be a whole lot more than just another nice Corvette.

With complete disregard for whatever purists might think Steve set out to do exactly what he wanted with the ‘Vette because in his own words: stock sucks.

His vision necessitated a rebuild from literally the ground up; the sunflower yellow paint was stripped, the interior was redone, the vacuum setup that controlled the wipers and headlight cowls/doors was binned, the firewall was shaved, and a 350 with 202/160 heads and polished everything was stuffed under the hood.

Finally to set it all off the car was laid out on air.

 The end result of a mountain of hard work is an award winning, irreplaceable, car that lives up to the high standards set by the initial rendering.

While most of the pictures of the car taken at Autorama didn’t really do the car justice these amazing photos from Robert (match_box on flickr) certainly do.

Simply incredible is the only way to describe the end result of this project and I have no doubt in my mind you will see these photos of the car popping up all over the place very soon.

The full set of photos can be seen on Robert’s Flickr and I encourage you to go take a look.

Photo Credit: match_box
Illustration Credit: design165.com
Build thread

I also recently learned that Steve is friends with a couple of the mini-truckers out this way and has plans to drive the car to every show it attends from here on out so who knows maybe I will come across this car in the metal sooner rather than later…