CUP: Exclusive - Hendrick Still Making Horsepower

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CUP: Exclusive - Hendrick Still Making Horsepower

Rick Hendrick goes to work building his own race engine...

Tom Jensen | Posted June 26, 2012 Detroit, MI

Tuesday morning, Rick Hendrick flew to Detroit to build a supercharged 327-cubic-inch Chevrolet motor for his Camaro drag car. (Photo: SPEED)

NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick grew up building his own engines as a kid in Virginia tobacco country. And he’s still doing it today.

Tuesday morning, Hendrick flew to Detroit to build a supercharged 327-cubic-inch Chevrolet motor for his Camaro drag racing car, through a Chevrolet program known as COPO, short for central office production order.

Chevrolet is building a fleet of COPO Camaros for NHRA drag racing competition, and buyers can come to Detroit and actually assemble their own engines under Chevy supervision.

And that’s what Hendrick is doing today, with the help of ace COPO engine builder Rich McBride.

The engine that Hendrick is building today will be going in his own 2013 COPO Camaro, which is expected to be built in late July.

“I’m just really excited about this project,” Hendrick said in an exclusive interview with SPEED.com at the GM Performance Build Center in Wixom, Mi., where about 6,000 engines are hand-built every year. “There’s a tremendous amount of heritage in these cars. They will be as valuable down the road as a (1960s) COPO is today.”

For those of us old enough to remember the halcyon days of 1960s Detroit muscle cars, the COPO program was a secret ordering plan for high-performance cars. If your local dealer had a connection inside GM or enough juice in Detroit, he or she could order a car with options not available to consumers. Typically, that meant stuffing big-block 396, 427 or 454 cubic-inch rat motors in garden variety Chevrolet Novas, Camaros and Chevelles. The COPO cars also had beefed up suspensions, brakes, cooling systems and other goodies not found in new-car brochures.

In the 1969 Camaro, there were two 427 motors: COPO 9561 was the Corvette-based L-72 edition with an iron cylinder block, and COPO 9560 was the racing-designed ZL1 engine with a lighter aluminum cylinder block.

And those old cars are treasured collectibles now. A genuine, original COPO Camaro from 1969 in mint condition can fetch anywhere from $250,000 to close to $1 million, with prices seemingly rising every day.

But that was then and this is now.

The new COPO Camaro is a factory-built drag racing machine, designed to compete in the NHRA Stock Eliminator class, where, not coincidentally, it will battle the similarly purpose-built Ford Mustang Cobra Jet.

Among the myriad changes for the COPO Camaro are a solid rear axle instead of the standard Camaro’s independent unit, and the addition of a full chrome moly roll cage. The sound deadener and most power options are removed, as are the rear seat and the standard front bucket seats, with lightweight racing seats added up front. Other interior features include Auto Meter gauges, and a “line-loc,” which locks the front brakes only to allow drivers to do burnouts at the drag strips to heat their tires.

Naturally, the front and rear suspensions are drag-racing specific, with 29 x 9-inch racing slicks out back and narrow 4.5-inch-wide tires up front. Add the cowl-induction hood, fuel cell and high-performance fuel pump, and the COPO is ready to roll.

The COPO Camaro is also designed to accept multiple powertrain components — a naturally aspirated 427 cubic-inch engine, the same displacement as the original COPO Camaros from 1969, and a supercharged 327 engine. Transmission choices are the venerable two-speed GM Powerglide automatic, a three-speed auto or a a five-speed manual.

“The COPO Camaro is a proof of concept for what a Chevrolet Stock Eliminator entry could look like,” said Jim Campbell, GM U.S. vice president of Performance Vehicles and Motorsports. “And it is a clear indication that Chevrolet intends to homologate the Camaro for sportsman drag racing.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.

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Tom Jensen

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