One thing that I like to do at the drag races I shoot is to find the car that nobody would have ever expected to end up in the staging lanes, because it’s usually one of the more interesting stories out there. I’ve seen plenty so far, from an LS-swapped, rear-drive Mitsubishi Eclipse that held it’s own to to a 4G63-powered Mustang that would hang the tires at launch. But as I drove around Lucas Oil Raceway, trying to get oriented (read: figure out where the $*@%ing scaffolding was located) I drove by the pits of Mike Slaverio and completely forgot my goal. Sitting outside of Mike’s trailer was his 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix LJ, which, if you ignore the sponsorship decals, race-specific rolling stock, and the “12 FLAT” license plates, looks like any other mid-1970s brougham barge. There is one good reason why this Pontiac caught my eye: it’s one year off, but otherwise it’s a visual dead-ringer for the 1977 Pontiac Grand Prix that my father owned when I was in high school. That car was a fair bit rougher than Mike’s car, but it was the same maroon color, same red velour interior, same massive chrome railroad ties. I borrowed his car once, when my 1978 LeBaron’s upper control arm snapped, and learned three lessons that day: even in it’s smog-choked form, the Pontiac 400 is something to behold, in a small town news travels just as fast, if not faster, than the Internet, and that even at six-foot-three and 210 pounds, no teenager is immune to the power of a pissed-off father who was just told that his hot-shoe son was seen drifting two tons of tin Indian on the backroads of southern Illinois. Whoops.

For Mike and his family, however, the Grand Prix is virtually a member of the family. His parents ordered the car new in the spring of 1976, well-optioned with the 400ci V8, TH400, and highway-friendly 2.41 rear gears. They drove the car until Mike was 15, then parked it because the trade-in value had pancaked through the floor. Mike took it upon himself to fix up the Grand Prix so he would have a car when he was sixteen, so he fixed the rust spots, had the car painted, and did some basic low-buck mods to the engine and transmission. He loved driving it and always wanted to drag race, so when an all-Pontiac event came to the nearest strip, he sent the Grand Prix down the track and came to the bitter realization a lot of people do: their junk just isn’t as fast as they thought it would be. With a sixteen-second timeslip and a renewed vision of what he wanted the car to be, he walked over to the guys at Butler Performance (they were an event sponsor) and explained his situation. To say that they helped him out would be an understatement.

Mike’s car is still packing a Pontiac mill, but that is now a 461ci until based off of a 400ci that was machined out by Borowski Race Enterprises. An Eagle crank, Scat rods, and Ross pistons do the heavy work, while a Comp Cams bumpstick works the Butler Performance valve train up top. Butler Performance-modified Edelbrock heads allow the Quick Fuel carb to breathe, and the spent gasses flow out of Doug’s Headers and Spintech mufflers. A Trans Pro TH400 with a 258mm Coan torque converter runs the power out to a Moser M9 housing with 3.89 gears and a spool that was set up by TRZ Motorsports.

So there’s no issue with the power end of things. But the 3,960 pound curb weight (with driver) doesn’t lend itself to racing, does it? Actually, it does. The frame is stock, the front suspension is stock except for QA1 double adjustable shocks, and the rear only sports TRZ Motorsports upper and lower adjustable trailing arms and an anti-roll bar. Braking duties are covered with Aerospace Components discs at all four corners, Weld ProStars and Mickey Thompson rubber handle rolling stock duty and outside of a VFN fiberglass hood and a gutted front bumper, the body is all there…and surprisingly, so is the interior! The stock gauges have been swapped out for Auto Meter units and the shifter isn’t a Pontiac unit anymore, but those cushy buckets are still present and still feel as good as I remembered.

So how well does this Malaise monster work? The Grand Prix’s run a fastest E.T. of 11.19, has a fastest trap speed of 120 MPH, has pulled a 1.55 second 60 foot, and is plenty competitive in NMCA Nostalgia Muscle Car. With the backup support of Susan and Zach Slaverio and Adam Needles and the companies that have supported him over the years, the Grand Prix has come a long way from that first 16-second quarter mile. So far, in fact, that Slaverio mentioned that another round of weight shedding is on the way, and that a roll cage might also happen this winter, in time for the 2017 season. We hope to see the results pay off next year!