Lurch’s History

I special ordered her from Murdock Chevrolet on Memorial day of 2009. The only option I didn’t select was a sunroof, because it lowered the ceiling too much for me, and body kit stuff. I waited and watched status updates as she was assigned a VIN, and finally started being built, which was completed on July 24, 2009. I anxiously waited while she awaited a train to take her to Salt Lake City. Finally she was on her way, and I tracked the train car all the way here. She arrived in Salt Lake City on Tuesday August 11, and I went that night and saw her far across the train yard, and took my first of thousands of pictures of her. I waited again while she was transfered to the dealer and finally picked her up on Thursday August 13, 2009, to start our lives together.

Within a couple weeks, cam her first modification of rewiring the DRL lights to also come on with the rest of the lights, like fog lights. Within a month came her first performance upgrade of Doug Thorley shorty headers and muffler delete.

In July of 2010, we went on a road trip down to San Diego and all the way up Highway 101 to Washington State. It was an awesome trip, I took many pictures, and my recap of it made the front page of Camaro5.com.

In April of 2011, I installed the first of many suspension upgrades, lowering it an inch, and with stronger sway bars. Now set up better for performance, we went down to Pheonix to attend our first of several Camaro5 Fest’s, where we celebrated with other Camaro enthusiasts, raced, met some of the GM Camaro design team and had them sign Lurch’s strut towers.

Hearing my first cammed 5th Gen Camaro there at Camaro5 Fest, I desired the same for Lurch, so inquired about the parts from JDP Motorsports, which lead to me joining their team as the lead mechanic and shop manager. In July, I tore apart the factory L99 engine and she became the first 5th Gen Camaro L99 conversion car in Utah with a nice blower cam installed. With the stock torque converter, she was a little bit lurchy at slow speeds, which is where she gained her name as Lurch.

Time continued, and more mods came, such as heads up display, ambient lighting, LED lighting all around, various intakes, brake packages, suspension upgrades, long tube headers, catback exhaust systems, etc.

Then on October 21, 2011, on the freeway on my way home from work, a Subaru decided to change lanes without looking. The person in that lane then swerved out of the way, losing control and hitting me, pushing me into the car in the next lane, creating a Camaro sandwich. I chose the body shop, with one of the best painters I knew of, and monitored the repair process constantly, requiring only GM parts. Since new paint was needed on most of the car, I decided to upgrade several things, such as vented GM fenders and GM sideskirts. 3 months and about $13k in repairs later, Lurch finally came home again. It was rough, but she came back good as new, with some enhancements.

Soon after came the first power-adder upgrade, of an ECS supercharger, with related mods. She made about 850hp on this setup. We had fun racing and making cool sounds. Then in October again, came another dark day. We had driven down to St George for a Camaro club road trip. While drag racing on the old St George airport runway, I bent the stock crankshaft. After one of the runs, the balancer was wobbling and making some weird noises. We drove to Zions National Park, and the next morning leaving the hotel, the stock engine spun a rod, and the crank started knocking pretty bad. We pulled over and called a tow truck. But these kinds of problems aren’t that bad if you’re expecting them to happen. 850hp on a stock engine isn’t too bad, and you gotta expect something to fail unless you never use that power.

This brought on the big boy engine. A Livernois 429 LSX iron block engine made it’s way here and into Lurch. With the bigger engine, came further mods including a big boy supercharger, a Procharger F1-X. In time came further mods such as a 4L85 transmission, ZL1 rear differential with DSS axles and carbon fiber driveshaft, full suspension, fuel system, twin turbos, engine management system, roll cage, etc.

We have raced different types of racing across the country, focusing on drag racing in the latter years, until they closed our local Rocky Mountain Raceway and turned it into warehouses in 2018. When there were no more local drag strips, I decided to take her apart and refresh things. Well, life happened and time went on since then, and I decided to change things up. I sold the 429, 4L85, ZL1 diff setup, and engine management system. In late 2022 I started putting her back together with the current list of mods. Bringing it down from about 1500hp to about 1200hp on E85 and medium boost. Still very fast and powerful, still very drag strip and street worthy, and still very fun!