In less than a week, Bowling Green will be invaded by swarms of vehicles packing late-model power under the hood. LS Fest, the full-on celebration of the Generation III/IV Small Block Chevrolet, was a success from the first event onward, and this year things get even better, because in addition to the show and racing scene at Beech Bend Raceway, there will be autocross and track action at NCM Motorsports Park across town, and a ton of cruising in-between. Brian, Chad and I will all be running around during the event, working our asses off to bring you as much coverage as we can. We will cover the drags, the show field, the drifting, and the road course/autocross…and of course, we will be keeping our eyes peeled around the hotels and restaurants after the official events have wrapped up for the night!

To start the preview for this year’s festivities, what better way than to bring up one of the strangest vehicles we saw at the strip? LS engines get shoved into just about any vehicle you can think of, but the last car we expected to see in the staging lanes was a clean, black Mitsubishi Eclipse. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a nicer example of a DSM platform car, and with the tell-tale exhaust note and the slightly raked stance, it looked surprisingly good. It’s a solid 10-second car, and the owner has been playing with the bottle some. Will we see it in the 9 second range at the strip?