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Originally Posted by Phast SVX
now that i notice, that car dosnt even run!  no clamps on 3 of the boost hoses, there is also a missing allen plug in the passenger side fuel rail  who does that? |
It's a driver - you're looking at pics of the engine bay while the car was still being built.
No trick photography here: This Toro is rear-wheel drive and it has no trouble laying down long, long patches of rubber.
Quote from Jay from a Popular Mechanics article:
When I drove the new Bentley Continental GT, I thought, "This is really nice, but we built this car 40 years ago. It was called the Oldsmobile Toronado." That got me to thinking that I'd like to do a modern Toro.
I started with an original: a beater I bought for $800 from a buddy, Steve Reich, who runs Film Vehicle Services. They supply cars for movies.
Understand that the original Toronado was an engineering marvel for its era--a big front-wheel-drive car with a V8. But my crew and I wanted to make 1000 hp--a nice, round number. Out went the front-drive and the car's Hy-Vo silent chain drive. We knew we had to go with rear-wheel drive. We installed a prototype Gen IV small-block V8 by GM Performance. With a 4.11-in. bore and 4.0-in. stroke, it's 425 cu. in.--same as the original Toro. The heads are from Cadillac's CTS-VR race car. My guys fabricated the headers and the turbo intakes. The two turbos inhale through a pair of K&N filters, and dump into two GM mass-air meters and a huge 90mm drive-by-wire throttle body. It has 8.3:1 compression and there's a GM Performance prototype hydraulic roller cam. The transaxle is a reworked C5 Corvette 4L60-E four-speed automatic. Oh, the drive axles are beefed up too.
We cranked the boost up to 19 psi, pumped in C12 racing fuel and put it on the dyno: 1070 hp at 6350 rpm and 1000 lb.-ft. at 4750 rpm.
I wanted to keep the car as stock-looking as possible. My feeling is that these cars were designed by guys who went to college. They were professionals who did it for a living. And, honestly, as much as I like hot rods, I rarely see a chopped car that looks as nice as stock.
When you look at a modern American car, you think maybe it's a Buick, maybe it's a Daewoo, maybe it's American, maybe not. But the Toronado looks like a car built in the United States. It has that confident design and real presence. I always thought it was one of the most outrageous cars of its day.
The Toronado was the first practical full-size front-drive car since the 1936 Cord 810. At the time, the Europeans were saying you couldn't put more than 200 hp through the front wheels. "You'll break the halfshafts," they said. But here was a car that weighed 4311 pounds dry, with 385 hp, and it handled beautifully. It even won Pikes Peak.
Thanks to shop foreman Bernard Juchli and my talented crew at the Big Dog Garage, my car is 300 pounds lighter than it was when we started: We used a lot of aluminum and a carbon-fiber driveshaft. Each wheel is milled from a 400-pound block of billet aluminum.
Those wheels are my favorite part. We went against the current fad of monster 20-in.-plus dubs. Instead, GM Performance custom-made a set of 17x8s. That corrected a problem I saw in the original: To me, the wheels never sat quite right in the wheel wells. The fronts looked a bit too forward, and the rears were recessed too much. And they had that big hubcap that mimicked the Cord. So we just built a solid wheel, one big enough to fit Corvette disc brakes. The tires are 17-in. Bridgestones that Coker Tire made to look like the original 15-in. Redlines.
We made a chassis of boxed steel under the center of the car. It was easy to do with our Scotchman Circular Gold Saw, which Juchli says "cuts right through steel as though it was butter." Then we attached the Corvette's aluminum independent suspension, rack-and-pinion steering and ABS. We mounted the water tanks for the intercoolers inside the fenders. The engine's about 18 in. farther back than originally, for a 50/50 weight balance.
We did have some problems. For instance, the car runs with 90 psi of fuel pressure. The fuel circulated so quickly that it got hot. So we put a fuel cooler running off the a/c unit into the fuel line. And the fuel pump was so big it looked like a fire hose pump. So we buried two Bosch fuel pumps inside the fuel cell.
Inside, we kept that classic deep-dish steering wheel and the Toro's steering column. We used the old instruments but the drum-type speedo was converted to electronic operation. We're using a Vintage Air system: It's small and compact and we installed it in the back. Then we converted the dash vents: One's a boost gauge, one an exhaust-gas temp gauge and one the clock. We kept the stock radio face but converted it to AM/FM and put a CD player in the trunk. The black leather seats were custom-built by Lear to mimic the style of the '60s, but with modern lumbar support.
Best of all, this car is really, really fast. The midrange is unbelievable. It's a riot to pull alongside a Corvette on the freeway and the driver nods, "Hey, nice Toronado." I signal him to go, and while he's laughing, I blow his doors off. Plus, take it up a winding road and it handles nearly as well as a Corvette--one with way more power and an 800-pound handicap.
When I started this project, everyone thought I was crazy. It was like looking at an elderly woman and not believing she was ever beautiful. The Toronado's styling, from the Bill Mitchell design era, is unique. That rear panel is one of the prettiest shapes in automotive styling--it was flared before anybody thought of doing flares on production automobiles. It's a handsome car, but it's not a pretty car. I love the gold paint. Everybody fought me on that one. "Man, that gold looks creepy. Nobody does gold anymore." But that's why we did it, because that's what they used back then. You realize the Toro's designer, David North, really picked the colors he felt best accentuated the shape.
The other night, I was driving down Sunset Boulevard. And, lo and behold, there was a brand-spanking-new Bentley Continental GT in front of me. I followed it onto the freeway. The driver stepped on it to pull away from me, so I stepped on it. I pulled up next to him, gave him a "nice car" thumbs up and absolutely smoked him. He was stunned. Mission accomplished.