High on horse power

Most of us hope our automobile engines last a long time. Maybe until the car it powers is ugly, old and even possibly paid off.

Not so the 350 cubic inch, 900-horsepower powerplant in Marty Stromberger’s 1988 jet-black Pontiac Firebird. He almost dares it to self-destruct from abuse.

After all, the motor cost Stromberger just $100, but it has afforded him the notoriety of a place on the pages of a future issue of Car Craft Magazine. “It’s a 150,000 mile engine,” Stromberger explained.

“Normally you’d have $3,000 or $4,000 in the basic engine, not counting all the stuff around it,” he said. “I basically put a stock engine in my car with twin turbos (chargers), nitrous and all of this stuff hung off of it,” Stromberger said of the bargain-basement motor. “The thing refuses to blow up,” and in fact has propelled the car to a 9.74 elapsed time at 141 miles per hour.

“I started a thread on the Web site turbomustangs.com,” Stromberger said: “‘How long until it grenades?,’ ” a term drag racers use to describe a motor that blows up.

Car Craft Magazine, a publication devoted to people doing budget horsepower, got wind of Stromberger’s project. “They checked it out and liked what they saw,” Stromberger said. The magazine dispatched a crew to shoot a spread at Little Bennies Drive-In on East Trent a couple of weeks ago.

The car is street legal, but a race car as well.

Stromberger said much of the original equipment – the power windows, mirrors and power trunk with a luggage smasher – is still intact. He did have to remove the power steering to accommodate some of the racing goodies under the hood.

Ironically, the budget motor from a 1980 Chevy pickup has out-performed the engine Stromberger had built for the car. It had overheating problems.

“I didn’t have any money to rebuild the original motor,” Stromberger said. “I thought, let’s just put it in and see what it does.”

The motor, which he picked up from the floor of his dad’s business – Tim’s Hot Rods – has been in there almost two years.

“It’s all stock. Just an old, greasy, nothing engine,” Stromberger said of the multicolored “patchwork quilt-looking thing.”

Stromberger said he tried to keep it all original looking, but admits he’s “bolted a lot of shiny parts on it.”

Stromberger competes for trophies at Spokane Raceway, “racing just for fun,” he said in the track’s Bracket One. He’s stayed away from the track recently, however.

“I have had to go easy on the thing for Car Craft Magazine. Now that that’s done I can take it out and run it like it’s meant to be driven,” he said.

Besides running on the track, Stromberger also drives the car to the track as well. The only things that really give it away as a racecar are the rear racing slicks and the tan roll cage that winds around the original upholstery.

Stromberger built the entire car, did his own paint work, getting rid of the flaky metallic red paint in the process.

“The car was in pretty good shape car when I got it,” Stromberger said of the former daily driver and weekend warrior who moonlighted on the race track doing auto crossing. The stock motor in the car delivers 245 horsepower. “Most guys agree a stock engine in good shape could probably make 450, 500 horse (power) before you run into trouble breaking things,” Stromberger said.

Equipped with twin turbo chargers, “the engine probably makes 775, 780 horsepower on motor alone and the twin turbochargers.” A nitrous-oxide add-on kit gives Stromberger a 100 boost in horsepower. “Throw another 100 (horsepower) shot on and that’s when it really gets exciting.”

Said Stromberger, “that was Car Craft’s big thing. It was a budget horsepower build. It really appeals to the nature of the magazine.”