An American Iron Extreme Icon Remade for NASA GT

After his years driving in IMSA came to a close, NASA NorCal driver Ken Kurtz, a former GTP driver with a fondness for all sorts of machinery, decided to treat himself.

“After the prototype stuff ended, I started running a bunch of VIP events, which introduced me to a wide set of manufacturers and aftermarket companies,” Kurtz said. “In 1995, I bought a then-new Trans Am. I took it to autocrosses and the odd track day for a couple months. Then I got hit. A PG&E box truck packs a punch. Because it was brand new, and it was a limited edition GT car, they didn’t total it, I think.”

Two months after getting rear ended in his Trans Am, Kurtz was partially bedridden with neck and back pain, but was eager to put the car in the right place and get back in the seat. You can’t keep a racer sedentary for long.

“I was ready, but the car took three months on a frame rack before it was straight,” he said. “I felt bad. The shop had only two frame racks. I don’t know how they stayed in business with my car there.”

Adding to his ruminations was a special edition Viper he’d been offered, but bought a house instead. “My friend had a GT2 Commemorative Viper for the Le Mans win – one of 250 – and was only asking $60k for it. I wasn’t looking at the Viper as an investment then, but now they’re worth seven figures. Using that money to buy a house instead of the Viper is one of my biggest regrets,” he joked.

He still had to race, though. With some spare cash drummed up after selling a few shares, he decided to put the Trans Am on par with the Viper.

“I was pretty close with John Lingenfelter then, and he offered to do a deal with me that would make the car as quick as the Viper for a fraction of the cost,” he explained.

In exchange for promoting his cars and a little money, Lingenfelter sent Kurtz a mild 383 making about 550 horsepower and a TransZilla Tremec gearbox. While the car started with a set of Konis, making it into a pure track car required more rate and a set of custom Bilsteins.

Big (Development) Deal

With Kurtz’s connections and an industry looking to advertise, he brought on partners to help the car evolve, and in exchange, he’d help them with promotion and ride-alongs. Yokohama provided the tires, Baer agreed to make the brakes, and Weld Racing stepped up with custom wheels measuring 18×10 inches and 18×12 inches. “I kept bending them on the curbs, so they came up with a rolled design to save me,” he added.

Lingenfelter knew Kurtz had the talent to help him settle some personal scores. There had been a feud between the two owners over the Callaway Sledgehammer, the world’s fastest Corvette at the time, and Kurtz was the heavy hired to make things right. “When a Sledgehammer was supposed to attend an upcoming track day at Laguna, [Lingenfelter] told me he’d be sticking a special motor in the car. He wanted to make a point.”

This SB2-style 427 was a hair’s breadth away from a full Winston Cup motor, with nearly 900 horsepower and a soft limiter at 8,800 rpm. “The only difference between that and a contemporary NASCAR motor was it had EFI. It hated idling, but it was dependable,” Kurtz added.

No doubt, it would provide the punch to put Lingenfelter’s rival in the rear view, and that’s exactly what happened.

Point proven, Lingenfelter plucked his near-NASCAR engine from the demo car and replaced it with a 383 sporting an ATI supplied D1SC positive displacement blower to challenge Vortech’s unbeatable Mustang. For early 2000s tech, the blown LT was cutting-edge, but once the motor got hot, the lightly modded GM computer had a hard time adapting.

“It cut power and reapplied it aggressively. It was like hitting the nitrous bottle. In a half-second, you had another 250 horsepower to play with. I got tired of dealing with it, and we replaced it with a normally aspirated 383 after that,” he reminisced.

Around that time, Lingenfelter was involved in a serious accident at Fontana, and since the deal was more the handshake-type between two friends, Kurtz suddenly found himself without an in at the company, which had provided his last three engines.

The car then sat for some time. A friend rebuilt the 383, and it lasted for a bit, but it lacked the Lingenfelter magic. Then the sponsored track days started to fade away, and so Kurtz decided it was time to make it a dedicated race car.

No More Ridealongs

His friends pointed him to Clay Witt at TPi Specialties. “I told them I wanted to move away from the LT platform, and I wanted to make between 700 and 800 horsepower reliably.”

As funny as it sounds, the only thing standing in the way of meeting this car’s potential was the engine. “The LT kept breaking, and the 580 horsepower at the wheels wasn’t enough anymore. Around 2010, TPi built a 422-c.i.d. LS3 that made about 710 horsepower to the wheels at 7,500 rpm,” Kurtz said. “It had a much wider powerband, which allowed me to swap out the six-speed Tremec for a NASCAR-spec four-speed Jerico and save 80 pounds.”

Alan Blaine of Blaine Fabrication helped take the Trans Am’s shortcomings and make them disappear. Blaine and Kurtz worked well together. Kurtz could relay his inputs and Blaine knew how to make the changes. The result is a Trans Am that behaves like it has independent rear suspension. It also has power steering, which makes the big slicks easier to use. They’re pretty good at putting the power down once they’re warm, too, but you need to be careful the first couple laps.

In addition to making the car easy to drive, Blaine made it safe with a robust DOM cage, NASCAR-style side impact bars, crash impact foam, and an intrusion plate welded to the outside of the door plate to disperse the energy across the bars simultaneously.

Blaine had to come up with a solution to the car’s axle-hop. “He devised a decoupling panhard that would decouple under deceleration, which prevents the transmission shift from disturbing the rear axle under decel. Along with that, Strange sent us a stouter version of its 12-bolt rear because we were cracking axle tubes constantly,” Kurtz added.

Weighing in at 3,600 pounds, the factory ‘95 Trans Am would never be considered a welterweight, not even after being put on a strict diet. However, a powerful middleweight can work wonders, so he made weight loss a priority.

He began by replacing the T-tops and driveshaft with carbon items from ACPT. Along with that, he installed a decklid and a hood made from fiberglass, replaced the windshield and the rear glass with plexiglass pieces, and pulled all the bumper foam and unnecessary plastic pieces from the front bumper. “The weight loss was worth not being able to bump draft any longer unless I wanted to have to reshape the airbox after every race,” he said with a laugh.

“Blaine was obsessed with weight. We even spent a weekend pulling rivets. He’d chop a fifth of a bracket off if it saved a few grams,” Kurtz noted.

Along with an ATL fuel cell in a custom enclosure from Blaine, and a lightweight LiFe battery, he was to cut about 700 pounds in total.

This was late 2008, and they were ready to go. “We decided to run on Super Unlimited weekend at Thunderhill, to give the race car a good shakedown, and we ended up winning both races. That was a good sign,” he said with a laugh.

Kurtz went on to run the car at the NASA Championships in American Iron Extreme, though his qualifying times might as well have put him in a separate class. A mysterious last-minute penalty forced him to start in the pits 30 seconds behind everyone else. Even so, the Trans Am was faster than anything by 40 mph down Miller’s (Burt Bros. Motorsports Park) front straight, and was passing three to five cars per lap. Within a few laps, he’d reclaimed his rightful position at the front of the pack.

“I made a pact with Dave Brown that, if I got back to the front, I wouldn’t pass for the lead until the last lap. We had to think of the spectacle, but three laps into the race, there was an incident that bunched up the field, and soon after I was in second right behind Brown. I was waiting for the right moment for optics, but he was dumping so much gear oil that he waved me by early,” he recalled.

It wasn’t all heroic, though. “The car ran out of gas on the last lap and had to be rolled to the scales. I think it was averaging about one gallon per mile then. We didn’t bring a gun – we brought a machine gun to a knife fight.”

After Kurtz won a smattering of AIX/SU races from 2005 to 2008, he spoke with Ali Arsham of USTCC about building out a new class. They were looking for a way to bring non-touring cars into the mix, so they created the GT class.

That brought in some amazing machines: A Factory 5 GTM, Ferrari Challenge cars, a PTG Works M3, and several others. They even raced against WTCC cars at Sonoma in 2012.

The straight-line speed is hard to convey, but an anecdote with a NASCAR driver in a contemporary stock car helps paint a picture. Despite the NASCAR driver taking a four-car lead over Kurtz leaving Sonoma’s Carousel, the two collided in Turn 7’s braking zone. Very little short of Can-Am cars have those sorts of closing speeds tied to the sound of a big domestic V8.

Kurtz won the AIX and the SU titles at Laguna in 2015 – a high point for him and the car. However, those glory years came to a close. When Kurtz filed for divorce, he knew that the car’s days in his possession were numbered. He ultimately sold the Trans Am to a friend, Ryan Johnston, who loved — and feared — the car for 10 years.

“The Trans Am will do whatever you tell it to do. For the first lap or two, it’s easy to overdrive until the brakes and tires get up to temp, but once those big rear slicks start working, the car hooks up and takes off. Going 180 down the back straight at Road Atlanta was a bit scary – I think that’ll scare most people,” he said.

Now going through a separation of his own, Johnston agreed to return the car to Kurtz, who hopes to dominate a new series in the same way he did 15 years ago. “I’m going to take this to NASA GT and show everyone this 30-year-old still has it,” he boasted.

With a record like his, Kurtz can boast. After all, it’s not really boasting if you can back it up.