The OneLapCamaro - Thoughts on SEMA and the Optima Invitational

[James OLC]

Now that I we are home and the OneLapCamaro is safely home and in my garage (awaiting some trouble shooting and a transmission tear down) I thought that I would post some thoughts, comments, and pictures from the last couple of weeks.
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As many of you know (or now know) we were invited by Optima Batteries to attend the SEMA show as their guest. We had been working to have the car ready for the show since mid-summer but it is amazing how quickly the show came up on us. About three weeks before the show I was ready to throw in the towel – I even went so far as to warn Optima that I wouldn’t be able to attend – because the last thing that I wanted to do was bring a car that was incomplete or less than satisfactory to anyone – including myself. After a long weekend of discussions around the shop - and across the country – we decided to pull out all of the stops and make a no-holds-barred run to get the car ready to go to ‘Vegas. At that point in time the car wasn’t running, wasn’t wired, had no glass in it, had no hood and was, to be honest, a long ways away from being together.



Chris Heighton at Heighton Restorations pulled out all of the stops, both personally and at his shop in Beiseker, Alberta, to get the car together in time for the SEMA show. For three weeks my days consisted of getting up in the morning, going to work, and then heading out to the shop until midnight to thrash on the car. Chris’s days were often 16 or 20 hours a day working to get the car together. Weekends were set aside, wives were abandoned, and everyone who we could recruit was called upon. I redid the tally today - in those three weeks before loading up the trailer we put no less than 600 hours into the build. We got the wheel alignment done at 1 in the morning a week before the show so we could test drive the car before the final assembly; when it was time to do the test drive, it was snowing but we went on with it anyways. Shane and Don at the shop set their own plans aside to help out in the last week - I can’t thank them enough for that – to make this happen.