Doug Nelson tells you true. What he says comes straight from the heart. No braggadocio. No mean spirit. No middle-finger salute. He could well be the incarnation of the archetypical Hot Rod soldier as envisioned by Editor Wally Parks and the magazine's fathers back in the '50s.
He took an absolute pile of crap and made it whole. He did the work. Some of it he didn't know even how to begin; he just made it happen. He hasn't got a whole lot of loot, but he's got the desire and the willingness to stand and persevere in a hail of potential failure. By the way, his '80 Camaro isn't a purpose-built racer. It's a street car. An 8-second street car, and has been since the first time he brought it out. It's a sled too, weighs more than 3,800 pounds with him in it. How does he do it? Turbochargers unleash manic power.
We love this stuff. Doug could have chosen some hackneyed bitch, something that's been done so many times it no longer piques interest or jacks up the fluid of emotion. It's a Camaro to be sure, but one rarely chosen for a laying-on of hands. Latter-day F-bodies are anathema to most-rubber bumpers, portly, no charisma-therefore they are cheap and plentiful (dig it, there were more Camaros built in '79 than any other production year), and especially so if they're a sheetmetal nightmare to begin with.
Our protagonist is a bus mechanic for the New York City Transit Authority, but not in the five boroughs. He hails from bucolic Wappingers Falls, about 75 miles north of Manhattan on the east side of the Hudson River. Doug is also single. If he had a family to support, he probably couldn't have done this car. His project appeals to us for more good reasons. He toils daily in the Land of the Giants, so how could some tiny little street car deter his resolve? He chose the duskier path. He chose to innovate rather than follow a lemming legion of others. Four years after the fact, he was hot-pedaling his passion down that road less traveled, two or three times a week as a matter of fact, weather permitting.
Yes, he had help, from "a very, very long list of friends," but on the main, Doug shirked nothing. He built the motor, installed the rollcage, did the body over, applied the paint, and pieced the suspension together. A real Renaissance man, Doug is. And of course there were failures, expensive ones, but he turned them into learning experiences, because without that kind of stuff messing up your life there can be no real success. The engine in the car is the third one he's ever built.
"I did all the work, setting all the bearing clearances, picking the rod length, piston-to-valve clearances, choosing the deck height, and so on. The first motor I put in this car lasted three weeks. Then it ate the mains," he says. On the spec sheet he filled out for this story, in the space for body details, Doug has, "I need a lot more paper than this, but here's the short version." In fact, he had originally put his faith in a "professional" who turned out to be a lot less talented than Doug imagined. When he couldn't bear looking at the left rear quarter the guy had stuck on the Camaro, he got cutters, torches, and a welder. He learned the basics, applied what could only be considered innate talent, and put a new one on himself. In the fracas, he woke to the fact that he was on a roll and continued with new door skins, a front fender, front and rear bumpers, and a new hood. For all its sheetmetal inconsistencies, the Camaro's main floor and trunk section were in remarkably good shape.