This would put the Chevelle's starting line race weight at around 3,150 pounds.

This is without driver, which we also plan to cheat by putting staffer John McGann in the driver seat, who weighs almost 50 pounds less than the author. As you can see from the above graphic, we achieved our goal of trimming the Chevelle to our 2,993-pound race weight. Race weight of car with half a tank of fuelĪfter we installed all the lightweight parts, the final test was to put the Orange Peel Chevelle back on the Longacre four-wheel scales to see if we made our weight. We also chose the ET Street tire because the bias-ply tires are much lighter. Not only is this a huge static weight improvement, but accelerating a much lighter wheel and tire package frees more power to accelerate the car. This shaved an amazing 70 pounds off the car. On the rear, we opted for the DOT-legal 26x10.50-15 ET Street tires mounted on 15x8-inch ET Drag wheels that are a svelte 31.5 pounds each. For the front, we used a pair of 15x3.5-inch wheels mounting a pair of 26-inch-tall ET Front tires that barely weigh anything. To reduce this bulk, we dug into the Mickey Thompson catalog and found a set of forged, strip-only, aluminum ET Drag wheels.

The larger rear tires are hefty at 27 pounds each, putting the pair of rear tires and wheels at just below 100 pounds. Our before weight included a typical street tire and wheel package using a set of 15x7-inch front and 15x8-inch rear Rocket five-spoke Fuel Gray wheels mounted with a pair of 28x10-15-inch Mickey Thompson Sportsman S/R radials in back and 26圆-15 M/T front tires. This is also where we cheated a little bit. The biggest gain of this entire effort was the tire and wheel package.

This is not ideal, but at this point we just wanted to cut weight anywhere we could. This dropped 25 pounds, even if it was off the wrong end of the car. While searching through GlassTek's catalog, we also replaced the steel decklid with fiberglass. Next we started looking at small, individual components that included a Wilwood aluminum master cylinder, a smaller Optima battery, and we even resorted to making aluminum bumper brackets for the fiberglass bumpers. Substituting a California Performance Transmission 200-4R for the original TH400 also netted 14 pounds ('Transformation,' Sept. But the prospect of dropping 20 pounds demanded the 12-bolt's return. After the rearend test in the June '08 issue ('The Great Rear Axle Comparo'), we retained the Strange S60 rearend for its durability. We had to find a way to chisel another 230 pounds to get our A-body less than 3,000. This is when we decided to get fat-alistic. We then discovered that the partly lightened Chevelle weighed a mere 3,221 pounds and decided right then to trim Orange Peel down to a lean and mean 2,990 pounds. That got us thinking about what else we could do to lighten the car. After yanking out all that sticky stuff, we were shocked to discover the nasty pile weighed 20 pounds. While installing a new shifter, we uncovered a load of factory sound deadener under the carpeting. All these efforts were so successful that now we're motivated to push the orange crusher deeper into the 11s. Over the past few months, we've put a lot of time into our Orange Peel Chevelle, including new paint, a California Performance Transmission 200-4R overdrive, and a pavement-pounding trip between Los Angeles and Phoenix on the CC Anti-Tour. But we're talking about carburetors and muscle cars, not carbohydrates and Lean Cuisine. The 11 o'clock news talks about it all the time: America is fat-overweight-rotund-and we couldn't agree more.

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