John Csordas Jr is a Buick guy through and through. Attend just about any Buick event and John and his family will be there with one of their several Buicks. Our favorite ride of theirs right now is the 71 Skylark street car. Not your common street car, this 71 has a full 25.5 certified chassis from NRC motorsports and is set up to run a drag radial. The car sees some street duty, and is raced in full street trim. One thing a lot of guys fail to realize is that most of these Buicks are heavy. Like really heavy. Junior’s car makes the scales whimper, weighing in just a couple of doughnuts short of 4000 lbs. To run bottom 9’s at 150mph like it does (yeah, you read that right) it has to be making somewhere over 1,000 HP, probably closer to 1100.
Power comes from a stock stroke 455 Buick built by Scotty’s Engine Technology in Florida. The internals are smart, but straightforward. Stock crank, R&R aluminum rods and Wiseco pistons round out the rotating assembly, which is held in check with a Rob Giroux (Precision Billet Designs) halo girdle. The short block is topped off with TA Stage 3 heads and intake. The custom flat tappet camshaft is from Scott Brown at Competition Components, and is around 260@ .050, with .600 lift. A Procharger F1R making 12lbs of boost and blowing through a Quick Fuel 850, is what makes this combo really hum. All brackets for the Procharger were designed by Cliff Gilman, and fabricated by Precision Billet Design. A custom 3500 Converter from Lenny at Ultimate converters transfers power to the Mark Deconti Turbo 400 that shifts on its own with the governor set at 6000RPM. So far, the ten bolt with 3.73 gears has managed to hold up under all that power and weight. So far, the car has run a best of 9.12 @ 150 with 12 psi of boost. Hopefully spring of 2010 will show us even more.
Junior made sure to thank Scott Brown at Competition Components, Bobb and Geoff at Finishline, Precision Billet Design, TA Performance, Scotty’s racing technology, Deconti Transmission, and Lenny at Ultimate Converters.
Here is a video of John running in the 9.70’s in 2009.
