1973 Chevy Camaro

Tom Nelson and Scott Carpenter of Nelson Supercars heave the Strange Engineering 9-inch into the Bomb, step one to cinching F-Bomb power to the poor ol' ground.

Perhaps you've been following the saga of the F-Bomb, our mold-green '73 Camaro that we keep writing about in farcical language like "twin turbos with 1,500 hp" and "we're gonna drive it every day, plus drag and top-speed race it." You probably wonder how we think we're going to do that without spitting parts, or how we're going to make it drag optimized and street drivable at the same time. Us too. We've always planned for compromises, and one of them is that the car will start out in street/strip configuration before the suspension and trans are tweaked and the engine is detuned for other games.

Along the way we've also introduced you to the characters who've influenced this crazy project. This month we reveal the tutelage of Tony Akins at TCI Automotive and J.C. Cascio at Strange Engineering as they shoved us away from our initial plans and schemed a transmission and rearend combo for a heavy street car with asinine power and an eye on the 8s at the dragstrip.

The Transmisson
At the outset of the project, our menu for the 'Bomb included a TH400 three-speed automatic, though we briefly discussed a 4L80E with Chuck Johnson at Finish Line Transmissions because we thought we wanted overdrive. The 4L80E is a computer-controlled four-speed automatic that's derivative of the TH400, though virtually no one other than Finish Line sees it as a hardcore drag racing trans. The drawback was the fear of the transmission's 2.48:1 First-gear ratio, which is the same as the TH400's. Cars like ours often have trouble hooking up with too much torque multiplication, which is why many TH400 racers use higher aftermarket First gears. Another problem is that NHRA requires an SFI-approved flexplate shield for cars quicker than 9.99 e.t. and a trans shield for those quicker than 10.99. Neither item was available for the 4L80E at the time that we had to make the decision.