Touring the Lingenfelter Collection is most certainly on our bucket list. With close to 200 cars sitting under one roof, it’s pretty much the mecca of high-performance GM iron, not to mention, some of the hottest exotics from all over the world – including Ferraris and a Bugatti Veyron.
But the collection’s owner, Ken Lingenfelter, has a soft spot for GM vehicles, Corvettes in particular, and he has one of the most profound Vette collections in the country. Probably the world, really. It’s a collection he enjoys sharing with the world, especially for charity.
Basically you can find at least one example of anything from the 1950s, all the way up to today, pertaining to GM muscle or sports cars in the Lingenfelter Collection. Not just in terms of factory production cars, but even one-off concepts, ultra-rare tuners, and factory-prepped racers.
So when we ran across this video from /DRIVE dating back to 2012, we had to share it. It features Big Muscle host, Michael Musto, interviewing Ken Lingenfelter and Mike Copeland of Lingenfelter Performance Engineering.
The highlights of the video include a pair of special Corvettes. The first, the 1953 Duntov Test Mule, is a firsthand look at what many enthusiasts, including your author, consider to be genesis for the Corvette and the small-block Chevy V8.
As it’s told in the video, the Duntov car is one of the first Corvette test mules, and it’s powered by one of the very first small-block Chevy V8s – it doesn’t even have an oil filter, as Copeland states.
Oh, and Smokey Yunick had his hands all over that engine, too, as he was charged with getting the engine to perform to Zora Duntov’s expectations at Daytona. After the program was over, it sat in his shop for over 40 years.
The red C4, although not quite as rare as the Duntov car, is unique in its own right. Powered by an LPE-tuned LT5 with over 600 hp and 600 lb-ft of torque, this one-of-four 1993 ZR-1 Widebody is not your average underdog C4. This all-motor beast is basically the Corvette God would have driven back in the ’90s. It’s biblical.
This is the one Musto gets to take for a spin, too, and when he cracks open that electric cutout in the exhaust, via a dash-mounted key, it probably sounds a lot like God as well. If you don’t want to watch the entire video, at least fast-forward it to that part of the film, because it’s totally worth hearing that unbaffled, cam’d-up LT5 wail.
Now, obviously, GM EFI is all about bringing the latest and most relevant content to its readers, and we’ll continue to do so. However, the information in this video is still accurate, relevant, and just as interesting today as it was then, so it gets a pass. Plus it’s another chance to take a peek into the Lingenfelter Collection! We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Rick Seitz is the owner and founder of GMEFI Magazine, and has a true love and passion for all vehicles. When he isn’t tuning, testing, or competing with the brand’s current crop of project vehicles, he’s busy tinkering and planning the next modifications for his own cars.
