The next spring, Dan’s good buddy Ed was selling his box Nova. The man interested in purchasing it turned out to be the owner of the same ’71 Camaro Dan had checked out months earlier. His buddy texted him a shot of the Camaro for sale. That got Dan going again, so a three-way deal was negotiated and the Nova was handed over to the new owner, who in turn sold Dan the car he was after. “I don’t know if it was just dumb luck, but this car found me, and I wasn’t going to let it get away a second time,” Dan reveals.

Once back at the home garage, Dan checked out his new purchase. It’s a true RS split bumper car, which was cut up into a race car sometime in the late ’70s. It had a stock front suspension, a race bucket seat, race shifter, and a push start. The 496 in it was healthy and came with a big cam.

The Camaro looked like a winner, but the problem was that it had so much cam in it that it made it a bear to drive. The brakes were also insufficient, and it had manual steering to boot. So, in March 2022, the car was handed off to good friends Dave Acker, Steve Roe, and Mike MaCallion of A&W Performance Racing in Tullytown, Pennsylvania. “They started the first phase of things needed to make this Camaro safe for me to drive,” Dan says.

The front suspension was built up first, using QA1 tubular control arms and coilover shocks at the corners. Most of the parts for phase one were purchased from Mike Klemczak at K&M Speed & Truck in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

Next, A&W installed a Hydro Boost braking system with Wilwood discs front and back. Power steering was a necessary item for Dan, which was added along with Moser axles, thicker ladder bars, and safety tabs.

The Camaro was starting to come around and Dan enjoyed driving it throughout the following summer. Then he decided to go all out, so he brought it back to A&W for the final phase: the powerplant transformation.

Back in 2019, Dan’s brother died suddenly of a heart failure. “He had an 871 BDS blower engine out of his ’69 Chevelle SS that I received after his death,” Dan says. “I decided that engine would be the new heart for my Camaro. However, we decided to go bigger, starting with a Dart 540 M-block and adding a roller cam and keeping the Dart 345 heads and a pair of Holley Dominators to help feed this beast.”

It was important to Dan that this engine run on pump gas for driveability and it also needed to run cool. He added a Be Cool radiator with dual fans on a digital temperature control to keep the heat down. All that power is shifted by a Turbo 400, built up with a reverse manual valvebody and a trans brake. It feeds a Chevy 12-bolt stuffed with Moser internals and 4.88 gears.

A&W did a fuel system makeover and added NOS to this already potent setup. New, more comfortable TMI low-back bucket seats with race belts were added next, along with a more stock-appearing interior. The crew even went a step further by obtaining a stock console to which they added a B&M shifter (with nitrous button) to get this beast through the gears. A Dakota Digital dash insert and gauges keep track of the vitals, and the extra switches control the nitrous and the fuel pump out back.

Once the engine was installed, Dan had to think of how to present the incredible piece of eye candy in the engine bay. “Camaros ’70 and up didn’t come with a cowl hood,” Dan states. “So I went with a Glasstek flat hood so we could see more of my brother’s heart hanging out of the hood. A&W did a great job cutting around the blower while Mike Carr from K&M Speed & Truck painted the hood and laid down the matching stripes. Fred from Body Work by Bernard in Bristol, Pennsylvania, smoothed out the firewall to perfection.”