Mike Racke has built the latest diesel-powered muscle car we have seen, and possibly also one of the nicest diesel re-powers we have ever encountered. Mike took great pains to make everything perfect on his new ride, from the factory-appearing Chevelle dash with boost and EGT gauges to the Corvette front suspension that can absorb any road hazards. Mike's resto-diesel hot rod is a 10 out of 10.
To understand why he took this path, we have to rewind back to late 2005 when Mike took a ride in Joe Komaromi's Duramax diesel-powered Hummer H1. "I couldn't believe it," Mike says. "It was an 8,000-pound rig, and it felt like my 10-second drag car. It was then that I knew I had to put a Duramax diesel in a Chevelle." Since Mike restores Chevelles and other muscle cars for a living, he had no problem rescuing this '70 Chevelle from the scrap heap.
With more than 1,000 lb-ft...
With more than 1,000 lb-ft on tap, the Chevelle has no problem spinning the rear tires on command.
Remember folks, this is back in early 2006, so there were no stand-alone wiring harnesses, or swap kits available for his project. Mike had to take the hard route, fabricating much of the Chevelle himself from scratch. To start off, Mike replaced the rusty quarter panels before sending the car off to Fast Eddie's Race Cars in Orange, California. There Eddie mounted the engine, fitted the Art Morrison chassis with a Corvette C5 front suspension and custom-built rearend and built some killer wheel tubs for the 33x22-inch rear tires. Once Mike got the Chevelle back from Eddie's, all that remained was the 10 zillion things left to do to turn it into a running vehicle.
Mike had many hurdles to tackle before the Chevelle was completed. The '05 LLY engine had an extra computer to wire in, and the dual CP3 provided by PPE needed a custom mount to clear the twin turbochargers. The engine was moved back 8 inches from the stock big-block location, so a custom dash had to be built. The wiring, cooling system, and turbochargers were all one-off pieces that required a lot of attention. All these problems and more were conquered by Mike working on the vehicle "about 5-6 hours every night after work for two years." Mike's Duramax-powered Chevelle project soon started to grab a few other people's attention.
"I brought a ported Duramax cylinder head to a car show and had people guessing what it was from." After about five minutes one of the guessers gave Mike a business card indicating he was Darryl Bassani from Bassani Exhaust. "Darryl doesn't really do custom stuff," Mike said. "But he thought I had such a creative project that he said he would make an exception." In this case, "custom stuff" meant a set of headers and downpipes for Mike's Duramax-powered turbo Chevelle.