The rest is muscle-car history that’s still unfolding, from Chevy showrooms to grassroots shops like Sled Alley, where owner and fabricator extraordinaire Matt Gurjack is one of Stielow’s many friends and colleagues in Pro Touring. “Everything just worked better than the Fords: easier to work on, the engines made big power easier.” “Suddenly I got it: This is why everyone hopped-up old, crappy Camaros,” he said. Cue the lightning bolt, with small-block Chevy thunder. “Just-right” was a white, rust-free ’69 Camaro RS with 50,000 miles, for which Stielow paid $3800. But Corvettes were too expensive, Chevelles too big.
THE FIRST HOVER CAR FULL
“I decided I needed to get a Chevrolet,” he says, and he let a buyer drive off with his Mustang and a garage full of Ford parts. Everything just worked better than Fords.” “This is why everyone hopped up old Camaros. But only Caterpillar and GM offered jobs to the University of Missouri-Rolla student. The self-described “punk kid from Missouri” says he dreamed of working for Ford and didn’t particularly like Camaros. He’s got a problem-solver’s manner, frameless specs, and brown hair just a few millimeters beyond buzzcut. Here at Sled Alley, just a few stoplight races from the Tech Center where Stielow started his GM career, the man resembles a technical drawing of a Detroit engineer. That included the ’66 Mustang fastback he drove to his first day as a GM intern 33 years ago. “I grew up in a Ford family, and that’s all I had until I went to GM: ’69 and ’70 Mustang Boss 302s, ’71 Mach 1, just a ton of ’em,” Stielow says. That’s where his latest, decidedly bitchin’ Camaro has been taking shape over two years. Stielow confesses this in a shop called Sled Alley Hot Rods located in Detroit’s east-side suburbs. SIGN UP FOR THE TRACK CLUB BY R&T FOR MORE EXCLUSIVE STORIES This story originally appeared in Volume 3 of Road & Track. But there’s a skeleton in his Chevy-wardrobed closet: The GM lifer, the Obi-Wan of the fabled ’69 Camaro and the Pro Touring movement, was once a Ford man. The Missouri product and engineer-now director of GM Motorsports Competition Engineering-built his reputation by creating some of the world’s fastest, most fantastical muscle cars. Now take out the garbage, and grab me a beer. Brand Y is shit, best left to perverts or junkies. Dinner-table discussions leave little room for dissent: Brand X will win the race and rescue the planet. Or Pops may hover over the crib, repeating, “Say Mopar. Before the squalling infant knows it, his umbilical cord is in a neat Chevy bowtie. Throughout the industrial Midwest, it’s forged early, in families whose livelihoods depend on a healthy domestic car industry.
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