Collector Classics: Street-legal racer

Retired Vancouver principal’s head-turning, 350-hp labour of love built from scratch

BURNABY, B.C. — Duane ‘Woody’ Woodside gets bashful when asked to pose with his hobby car.

“I don’t really want any attention,” he says, adding the car he designed and built from the ground up “speaks for itself.”

But the car screams for attention.

The three-foot tall, lightweight, high horsepower super modified racer that sits in the driveway of his Burnaby home invites passersby to walk into lamp posts and motorists to do a 180-degree turn to see if that was really a race car they had just seen.

The racer nose, giant rear “Phoenix” wing, open engine compartment sporting a 350-plus horsepower Chevrolet LS1 engine, headers leading into side exhaust and side mounted radiator, three roll bars, side impact rails and open cockpit declare that this vehicle is built for a track. Only it is street legal.

Woodside became enamoured with the alcohol-fuelled 850 horsepower super modified racers he saw competing at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, Washington and Phoenix, Arizona that can hit speeds of up to 280 kilometres an hour.

Retired high school principal Duane Woodside with the street legal super modified racer he designed and built from scratch.

The cockpit of the hand-built machine is all business.

A Chevrolet LS1 V8 engine producing 350 horsepower plus powers the street legal super modified racer.

Woodsides’ modified racer is a head turner when driven on city streets.

A side-view of the dream machine.

It’s built-for-the-track looks never fail to turn heads.

The retired Vancouver secondary school principal initially investigated kit cars from England including the Dax sports car and rear-engine Ultima. But regulators were not going to allow a racer built with a kit from another country on Canadian roads.

He subsequently discovered that he could build his own car from scratch and, if it passed a government inspection, it could be licensed for the road. He drew his vision of a two-passenger, super modified car out on paper. Then he spent a week building a mock-up frame out of 2X2 inch wood.

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