But George’s first dive into a classic muscle car wasn’t a Corvette. At age 15 he set out to purchase a ’69 Road Runner without telling his dad. Ironically, his dad’s girlfriend co-signed for the car that George made payments on but never got to take home. “I was paying $50 a month on the car, and when I was close to paying the $1,700 in full my dad found out and squashed the deal, so I never even got to bring it home,” George tells. “I was totally bummed.”

Eventually, George got past the botched Road Runner purchase and moved onto owning numerous other muscle cars throughout his life, but he was never able to shake the image of his brother’s Corvette. Years later he and his son were watching The Fate of the Furious and both were digging the red C2 Corvette with Michelle Rodriguez’s character Letty Ortiz behind the wheel. The car was sporting a widebody with fat tires all around and that brought George back to his brother’s ’67 and the idea for his next build—the same one he’d wanted since he was 12.

With the Corvette fresh on his mind, George picked up one in decent shape and hauled it over to Dustin Hacker and the crew at Nostalgia Hot Rods (NHR) in nearby Henderson, Nevada, for a full makeover. According to George, he and Dustin share a similar vision when it comes to building cars. “Most of my cars have a common trait in that they must be wide and low,” George states. “Dustin has the same taste, so the first idea was to turn this Corvette into a widebody beast. Throughout the build process I would come up with an idea and Hacker would totally play off it and make it happen exactly how I had envisioned.”

The NHR crew tastefully fattened up the body (14 inches up front and 16 inches out back) careful not to cross the line and “overcook” it, then prepped the bulbus Vette to perfection prior to dousing the body in a decadent layer of R-M black paint that looks as deep as the car is wide thanks to the multiple layers of R-M clearcoat and Haker’s insane attention to detail. “I’ve seen Dustin in action, and his quality control is off the charts,” George says. “If there is one subtle blemish in any aspect of a build, he’ll do it over until it’s right. That’s just how he and his team operate. It’s what makes his builds stand out above and beyond most anything else out there.”

Custom touches include NHR-made stinger hood scoop, modified factory bumpers, and Ringbrothers outside mirrors. George subscribes to keeping a good balance between custom nuances and original ancestry with most of his cars. Yes, he could have gone with more over-the-top, one-off bits on the Corvette, which is quite possible with the talented NHR crew, but that wasn’t the plan for this car.

That objective also lies under the hood in which the NHR gang shoehorned a 427ci big-block between the ’rails and topped it with a vintage-looking FiTech GO Stack injection system. “This engine actually came out of a ’69 Camaro that Hacker was building for a customer at the shop. The Camaro owner wanted to go with a huge horsepower, twin-turbo LS, so I snagged up the big-block as it was a perfect fit for this build,” George states. “I have other cars with big power, but with this engine coming in at about 550 hp to the tires, it makes a nice street driver that behaves well in pretty much any situation, which is one of the reasons I wanted to build this car. Oh, and it looks totally badass.”

The original chassis was swapped for an Art Morrison GT Sport chassis, which offers increased chassis stiffness, increased caster adjustability, modern steering, and, as advertised, comes with a choice of two available ride heights: low and very low. That chassis is also armed with AME’s Multilink IRS complete with Strange Engineering double-adjustable coilover shocks, providing superior handling performance. George prefers a manual shifting experience so a TREMEC T-56 six-speed transmission mates up to a McLeod SFT twin-disc clutch and onto a Strange 12-bolt carrier armed with 3.90 gears.