Clayton drove the car to a friend's house so they could fit-check some 17-inch wheels and tires that were borrowed from a '70 Camaro, as well as talk about suspension, brakes, and engine options. After he saw the car for the first time, wearing 17x11-inch wheels and 315/35-17 rubber, Clayton was hooked and construction began shortly thereafter. That's also when the difficulty of building a car reared its ugly head, and didn't let up for a year and a half.
About that same time, we had just finished one of Danger Mouse's best engine combinations (Part 6, Test 15) where we installed GMPP's Vortec heads, a COMP Cams Xtreme Energy hydraulic cam and rockers, an Edelbrock Performance RPM Air Gap intake, and a Demon 750 carb. DM made great power with this combo, and told Clayton it would be the perfect way to motivate the Camaro he was putting together that affectionately become known as "Zilla."
But Clayton admitted he wasn't comfortable building his own engine, so he had a copy of DM built. That turned out to be the easy part, and Zilla's new engine made over 420 hp and a monstrous 450 lb-ft of torque. Then it graced Super Chevy's cover in Aug. '03 with a follow-up story in the Jan. '04 issue detailing the entire buildup and test. Once installed in Zilla, Clayton trucked it over to Westech Performance Group for a day of riding on their Superflow chassis dyno.
The power results were typical. Zilla lost an average 21 percent through its 700-R4 automatic and 3.08-equipped 12-bolt drivetrain on its way toward making 326 rear-wheel horsepower and 398 lb-ft of rear wheel torque. Note: We would like to take this moment to correct a mistake we made in reporting Zilla's engine story back then. It was erroneously listed as having a stroke of 3.76-inch, when it's actually 3.48-inch, just like every other 350-cid Chevy ever built.
Any of you out there who have ever tried to paint a car black can understand this next part. Black is unlike any other color. In fact, black is the only color that has EVERY other color in it, except for white, and even sometimes that may be mixed in, too! When you look at a black car, everything shows-every minute detail, every scratch, every pit, every ripple; that's what caused the problem. Clayton couldn't find a painter in SoCal who was capable of delivering the kind of seamless, smooth black paint job that he wanted Zilla to wear.
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