Going from zero to 60 mph in one second will make people stop and stare, but Rod Saboury need not drive his 2,400-horsepower, twin-turbo-charged Corvette that fast to grab attention.
“It’s like driving a UFO on the highway,” says Saboury, 58, whose 1963-model Corvette is widely regarded as the fastest street-legal car on the planet. The car so impressed the editors at Super Chevy magazine that the 35-year-old publication named Saboury’s Corvette as its inaugural Car of the Year in its February issue.
In fact, Super Chevy editor Jim Campisano is among those who have seen the Corvette’s performance up close. He was there when Saboury posted eye-popping practice-run times in the Corvette during last summer’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Super Chevy Show at Summit Motor Sports Park in Norwalk, Ohio.
Saboury clocked his car at zero to 60 mph in one second. Moreover, the track’s Compulink timing system (which doesn’t measure miles per hour until the eighth-mile mark) clocked him reaching the eighth-mile mark at 4.56 seconds (159.27 mph).
Then the Corvette reached the quarter-mile mark in 6.95 seconds at 210.54 mph - the fastest-ever recorded drag strip run by a street-legal car.
“You can tell that he was so exited that he almost forgot to brake,” said Summit race director Nettie Damon, who clocked Saboury’s eighth-mile and quarter-mile times.
Saboury’s efforts also silenced detractors in hot-rod circles who claimed that such speeds were not possible in a 1963 Corvette.
“Think of a plane getting catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier; it was insane,” Campisano said of Saboury’s feat. “And the tires he uses are street legal tires. His car runs on pump gas. It’s not unusual to have a fast street car, but his has cup holders and power windows.”
The Corvette took two years to design and five years to build at auto-builder Lowdown Hotrods of Cambridge, Ontario. Saboury declined to say how much the car cost.
The car takes off in first gear, then shifts into second gear at 8,200 rpm. The car is designed to transfer power from the engine to the wheels in a way that promotes traction and prevents spinning at takeoff.
Saboury is a self-taught car builder whose penchant for speed began at 15, when he immersed himself in auto magazines and movies. Back then, he purchased his first car, a 1932 Ford, and while his friends spent the weekends at the movies or the shopping centers, he worked on his car, picking up spare parts at a nearby junkyard.
Saboury competed in his first official drag race at 18 and established himself as a builder of street cars that went very fast. He built two Corvettes (a 1957 model in 1995 and a 1953 model in 1998) that won National Muscle Car Association (NMCA) pro street class championships. He has posted eight world-record times.
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