Chris Nichols has played around with performance cars most of his life. He even took his passion as far as opening his own speed shop. He discovered, in the air capital of the world, there is more money to be made in the aircraft industry. At the time he purchased the 2005 GTO he did not have a project and had the itch to go fast. One night, a GTO on EBay caught his eye. Chris thought, what the hell, and put a low bid in on it. He thought he had been outbid, but the person that out bid him, retracted their bid and now Chris was the owner of a GTO.
After driving the car around for a couple of weeks he decided this was the car he was going to build in to a fast street car. And by street car, he means something he could drive everyday if he had to. A car with air conditioning and radio is what Chris wanted. He started doing research and found the LSX platform to be responsive to performance upgrades. He also found out they were fairly easy to work on and not a lot of people had attempted to make them fast.
Chris kicked a few ideas around on what to do with the GTO. He went as far as buying a Procharger D1 blower before deciding on going with more cubic inches and nitrous. With around 4,500 miles on the car, he yanked the transmission and engine out and went to work. The short block started off with a four inch stroke crankshaft, h-beam rods and J & E pistons that added up to 403 cubic inches. The stock aluminum block should be able to handle the power until Chris really gets carried away and buys an LSX block. The short block is toped with Dart 225 CNC ported aluminum heads and a FAST 90 mm intake.
The car came with a 6-speed which Chris loved. He knew he would not be able to get it to live long under the abuse he had planned. So in when a TH-400 built from ATI parts and Marty from Chance Converters was called upon for a 9 inch converter to put the power down. With the transmission and the horsepower departments taken care of Chris moved on to getting all the safety requirements taken care of to run as fast as 8.50, including an 8 point chrome-moly cage.
This is his first adventure into the fuel injected tuning world. After some research Chris settled on HP Tuners for the software. There was a big learning curve, but now he feels he has a handle on it and the results speak for them selves. According to all of the forums we have read, his car set the record for the fastest naturally aspirated 04-06 GTO in the country. The all motor pass was a 10.75 at just over 125 mph.
It is also one of the fastest in the nitrous/forced induction class too. I trade back and forth with the east coast boys for the title. It is also just on the verge of being the fastest 04-06 GTO with a pass of 9.70 at 141 mph. All of these passes are still on drag radials and over 4000 pounds. Last weekend the car was set to use the second stage, which has never been used, but due to weather conditions they only ran 1/8 mile. Chris leaned on the GTO a little too much on his last pass and broke a half shaft in the rear end. He is currently working on a project of installing an independent Ford 9 inch rear end in the car to take the abuse of the 1.43 60 foot times. I expect to see much quicker times one the rear end is fixed and he makes it back out!
