If you weren’t here in November, you missed out on a great Cars & Coffee show. My old friends Ed & David Hamburger brought their latest build from SVE. Specialty Vehicle Engineering started life as Hamburger’s Oil Pans in 1970. Ed realized the need for strong oil pans because wheelies tend to break stuff when the nose comes back down. Literally, the pan that changed an industry, it allowed him and his son David to form SLP, or Street Legal Performance in the 80’s. If you had a Camaro or Firebird, SLP sold everything necessary to make it a supercar.
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Busines was booming in 1996 when Chevrolet decided to resurrect the SS Camaro. Instead of doing it in-house, they allowed SLP to transform the Z28 into the SS in a factory located next to the Camaro’s assembly line. It was also the birthplace of the ferocious Firehawk, along with other GM special projects. But by 2002 the writing was on the wall. The Camaro would not pass modern crash standards without a complete redesign, so GM killed it and the Firebird. Ed decided to sell SLP to Jack Roush, and tried to retire…but once the new Camaro was announced in 2009, it was time to get back to work.
They stood out from the competition by going the extra step. Every SLP part was 50-state legal, in a time when modifying your car was almost a felony. A year ago they unveiled the Yenko Camaro 800, a fitting tribute to Camaro legend Don Yenko. We knew they were bringing it to our show, but the other car in their hauler took our breath away. The Yenko 1,000 is the culmination of many late nights and countless dyno runs. The 6.2 liter V8 is removed and then it goes under the knife. Then it is bored and receives forged internals that bumps displacement to 6.8 liters, or 414 ci. A new hand-ported set of LT4 heads and a top-secret cam are fed by a massive supercharger of their own design. The result is 1,000 horsepower and 875 lb-ft of torque.
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Back in 2001, the death of the Camaro was announced. My first job was as a grease monkey at Ron Anderson Chevrolet, so I decided to cash in my scholarship and buy one of their final cars. Ed and David have been friends of mine ever since, and I still own my first car. The quality of their products speaks for itself. From the medical-grade stainless steel used in the exhaust to the vinyl graphics that still look new. If you don’t need 1,000 horsepower, SVE will be happy to offer you the best Camaro upgrades on the market. Click the link below to learn more and tell us what you think of this beast in the comments below.
