PUHI — Mike and Liana Soong are back in school and raring to try out Mike’s project — a 1967 El Camino. “Bobby Barros is a good friend and when Mike found out about the car, his eyes lit up,”
PUHI — Mike and Liana Soong are back in school and raring to try out Mike’s project — a 1967 El Camino.
“Bobby Barros is a good friend and when Mike found out about the car, his eyes lit up,” said Liana, who is in the Kaua‘i Community College culinary arts program. “He bought the car from Bobby and since then, it’s become a class project with input from a lot of people.”
Saturday, when the gates to the Kaua‘i Raceway Park open, perhaps the project El Camino will have Liana behind the wheel as it makes its debut on the track.
“Right now, the race is scheduled,” Barros, president of the Garden Island Racing Association, said. “We hope the rain holds off.”
National Weather Service long-term weather forecasts for Kaua‘i call for scattered showers Saturday and Saturday night, with mostly cloudy conditions and a high near 80 degrees and a low near 63 degrees with east-northeast winds between 5-9 mph. Chance of precipitation in the Kekaha area is forecast at 20 percent.
“The car is ready to go, but Mike will be off-island,” said Barros. “But he wants the car to run.”
Liana said when the first race of the season was scheduled Feb. 27, she was ready to drive, but the car developed a problem with its cooling system. Conveniently, the race was postponed due to the tsunami threat.
Since acquiring the El Camino, Liana said they’ve gotten input from all kinds of people, students and instructors at KCC where Mike is enrolled in the automotive program.
“The motor has been changed to a 454 big block and the project took on a new name — ‘Demon Project,’” Liana said. “Originally, the car came with a manual three-on-tree transmission shifter. That has been switched to an automatic transmission with a BNM shifter so the driver can really slam it.”
The rear end has been switched from a 10-bolt to a 12-bolt Positraction.
Liana said the engine was picked up from a friend and worked to its current state.
“It’s been painted with Endura Shine which makes it easy to maintain,” Liana said. “It was bought from a friend and is probably the cheapest part of the build.”
Tante Azares, himself an auto enthusiast as well as a KCC automotive instructor, said the Soongs are friends so everyone wants to do things for the car.
“The boys (in automotive classes), Tante, everyone has a hand in this car,” Liana said. “She’s so nice.”
The interior and exterior work was done by Jeff and Amatha Vegas and is pristine, keeping many of the original lines of the El Camino upholstery.
Entering the Saturday drag races, Liana projects the El Camino to do well, although there is room for improvement.
“We’re looking at high 13s, or even low 14s reaching 100 mph at the end,” Liana said. “It’s not as fast as I want it.”
Liana said when her sons started inline hockey, she was inspired to start the roller derby program. That gave rise to the Derby Divas followed by the Garden Island Renegade Rollerz which celebrated the first Kaua‘i bout last Saturday night.
“Roller derby is just one person,” Liana said. “Racing is a family event. It’s culture.”
Timed trials for the Saturday drag races at the Kaua‘i Raceway Park in Mana start at 10 a.m. with bracket racing to start at 7 p.m.
Jeff Burk, editor for Drag Racing Online, is on vacation in Hawai‘i and scheduled to view Saturday’s race with race reports being filed for DRO as well as its sister publications, MaxChevy.com and Moparmax.com, states the DRO Web site.
For more information, call Barros at 635-6034.
• Dennis Fujimoto, photographer and staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 253) or dfujimoto@kauaipubco.com.
