TRACK STAR

As a used car lot owner, Gerald Gregory has had hundreds of vehicles pass through his hands throughout the decades. The vast majority have ended up with different owners within days or weeks of Gerald taking possession – after all, that’s the nature of the used car sales business. But a handful have been too special to let go. Such is the case with this 1971 GMC 1500. Luckily for Gerald, he came upon the truck easily enough – a friend’s neighbor happened to be selling it, and Gerald happened to be in the buying mood! 

And while most would choose to keep the truck original, or even slam it using one of the many off-the-shelf kits available on the market over some shiny billet wheels, Gerald had some different ideas spinning around in his head. In the end one prevailed as he wanted to turn his GMC into a competitive autocross truck. 

To bring his vision to life, Gerald turned to Finch Performance, a speed shop known for its mechanical wizardry. The team at Finch is no stranger to ambitious projects, as owner Brian Finch is a big fan of going big with each and every vehicle that rolls into the shop. After all, his name is on the sign, so he won’t be caught half-steppin’ any time soon! 

Gerald and Brian already had something in common from the get-go – they shared each other’s enthusiasm for Chevy and GMC trucks. Together, they mapped out a plan to transform the truck from a forgotten farmhand to an autocross champion. Once in the shop, the truck was stripped down then rebuilt with a fresh Finch Performance Apex Predator chassis, which sports a Detroit Speed & Engineering 4-link and sway bars, a DSE front subframe, and Viking triple adjustable coil-overs all around. 

The GMC was well on its way to becoming a high-performance beast with the addition of Baer brakes and 18×12 Forgeline wheels wrapped in sticky 335/30ZR18 BFGoodrich Rival S tires, but of course that transformation wouldn’t be complete without a proper powerplant. Gerald’s weapon of choice was an LT4 pulled out of a 2019 Z06 Corvette, along with a 10L90 automatic transmission from a 2019 ZL1 Camaro. The truck originally had a newer truck transmission swapped in, but according to Gerald, “Come to find out, no tuner or wiring company could control the truck transmission, so we ended up with the  ZL1 trans to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that held the build up for a couple months.” 

Once all of the performance stuff was eventually in place, Gerald figured that it was probably important to make sure that he’d stay safe while cranking the Sparco steering wheel lock to lock. So, a bolt-in roll bar was fabricated and installed, and leather Recaro bucket seats were affixed to the floor to keep Gerald firmly in place. 

But even with the truck’s main purpose being to have fun on the track, there would still be plenty of downtime in between runs. It only made sense to Gerald to make things a bit more pleasant while waiting. Adding a Restomod Air A/C setup was an easy and logical choice, but Gerald took things a bit further and had PJ’s Car Tunes install a sound system using Memphis Audio products. And since the body was already in fine shape, he definitely didn’t want to change the sheet metal. The old GMC had already been repainted at some point, so there was no reason to fix what wasn’t broken. 

Now that the truck was pretty much done, it meant that Gerald could now start registering for as many autocross events as possible. As you can imagine, he’s been quite busy driving it as much as possible since getting it back from Finch Performance, including events such as Holley LS Fest, C10 Nationals, and the Hot Rod Power Tour. Hopefully this GMC is a keeper, but in Gerald’s line of work there’s always another project waiting to be discovered!