WHEN OLD SCHOOL GETS A MODERN
WORLDS FIRST COYOTE POWERED CHEVELLE
This 1970 Chevelle has been part of my life since I was a kid. What started as an old hot rod slowly turned into one of the wildest projects I’ve ever taken on. A few months before SEMA, me and my buddies made the questionable decision to Coyote swap the car in my small Rhode Island shop… then immediately drive it 2,700 miles across the country to Las Vegas.
No trailer. No backup plan. Just late nights, chaos, caffeine, and a lot of faith in a homemade machine.
Against all odds, the old girl hammered across the country, turning gas stations into car shows and proving that real builds are meant to be driven. This project became more than just a car — it became a tribute to my late father, a test of everything I’ve learned as a fabricator, and the beginning of what Retro Fabworks is all about:
Building wild things that actually work.
Under the hood sits the world’s first Coyote-swapped Chevelle — blending modern Ford performance with old-school muscle car attitude. The build combines custom fabrication, hand-built craftsmanship , suspension upgrades, and countless one-off parts designed and built in-house at Retro Fabworks.
But this was never meant to be a “park it and polish it” kind of build.
This car was built to drive, abuse, redesign, improve, and evolve. What started as a wild idea inside a small Rhode Island shop quickly turned into something much bigger. The Chevelle has been featured by SEMA Spotlights, showcased on AutotopiaLA, and supported by some incredible companies that believed in the vision long before it was finished.
And then came the real test.
After thrashing to finish the build, we pointed the car west and drove it 2,700 miles across the country to Las Vegas. No trailer. No chase truck. No luxury road trip. Just long nights, breakdown scares, heat, noise, exhaustion, and the constant feeling that this homemade machine could either become legendary… or leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Instead, the old Chevelle hammered across America and proved exactly what this whole project was about: building cars that aren’t just meant to look good — they’re meant to live.
Now the next chapter begins.
The Coyote is coming back out, and the plan somehow gets even more unhinged: a 2,000 horsepower flat-plane Predator setup built to push this old bucket of bolts further than ever before.
The real question is…
Can we actually make 2,000 horsepower out of this thing?
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