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โWe do a lot of crazy stuff here,โ says Jessie Jewart of Jessieโs Performance in Fort Worth, Texas. โWeโve built more than 200 cars in the past seven years that weโve been operating. Weโve done drag cars, off-road trucks, pro-tourers, drift cars โ you name it. Basically, if you want it to go faster, we can do it.โ
Jewart recently brought out one of his personal projects to LS Fest West, where the sharp aesthetic and brutal performance of his twin-turbocharged Pontiac Trans Am turned heads even amongst a sea of killer builds. โI grew up wrenching with my dad โ the โ79 Trans Am was his originally,โ he explains. โHe had a need for speed, and I inherited it. I started driving the โ79 in high school, and I have another โ82 Trans Am drag car that I started building around that time too. The โ82 is what really got me into focusing on performance โ it was the first car I put nitrous on, and at the time, it was a pretty formidable competitor.โ
In 2004, Jewart decided to buy a โ95 Acura Integra from a local seller for $500 to start tinkering in the sport compact scene. โI did the eBay turbo kit thing, and after we put it all together, it really hauled,โ he says with a laugh. โIt was faster than my โ82, and so I really got attached to the import stuff for a while and the Pontiacs got put on the back burner.โ
Nitto NT01 tires are wrapped around custom two-piece 18x12-inch snowflake wheels. Stopping power is provided by Wilwood six-piston calipers up front and four-piston units in the rear.
Not long afterward, Jewart took a job working with PFI Speed, a tuning outfit based in Weld County, Colorado. โThey do a lot of Honda turbo builds, and when I was there, it was really just about pushing the envelope when came to making power with four cylinder engines.โ
And around that same time, the Trans Am went through a streak of bad luck.
โThe car got T-boned, so it was parked while I figured out what to do with it,โ he says. โAfter I got the insurance money from that, I bought all the parts I needed to fix the car, and I took it to this local restoration shop to get the work done. The shop actually ended up getting raided by the police, and the cops never returned my parts. They allowed me to pick up just the body โ it didnโt have a frame, rear end, or anything else underneath it.โ
The Trans Amโs tubular front subframe and torque arm suspension components come from TCI. Ridetech coilovers provide the stance.
Jewart says he dragged around this โdead horseโ of a car from one storage facility to another as the next few years went by. โAt one point, I let the storage bill lapse and the lady who owned the facility had the car towed to the junkyard,โ he recalls. โI didnโt even know about it until I happened to be going to the junkyard to look for some parts and, lo and behold, there was my car just sitting there. That moment was the push I needed to get the car rebuilt. I just thought about my dad and how important the car was to our family, and realized that I needed to do something with it.โ
So, in 2011, Jewart shifted his focus back to the โ79 Trans Am, acquiring a Butler Performance 461ci stroker LS and a 700R4 transmission to go with it, along with an array of bits and pieces that heโd need in order to get the car back on the road. โI was working at PFI at the time, and that kind of inspired me to do a turbo LS,โ he says. โI started putting a plan together, and thatโs when the brainstorming about what the car could be โ and what it is now โ really began to take shape.โ
Shortly thereafter, Jewart decided to set out on his own and open Jessieโs Performance. He also got his hands on a โ74 C10 and built a turbo 5.3-liter LS for the truck, a project which ultimately served as a primer for the more elaborate Trans Am build that he had in mind. โThat was a learning process โ I knew I needed to work with the LS a bit more before I took on the Pontiac build โ the Trans Am was a much bigger vision. I built the motor, the trans, the harness, put together the programming for it and so on. Once I got that finished and drove it, I was immediately hooked on LS engines. I was just blown away by how well it ran, the drivability โ all of it.โ
The reupholstered seats are factory Recaros from a Trans Am pace car. The Ridetech TigerCage provides an additional measure of safety and a welcome dose of structural rigidity. Clayton Machine Works provided the aluminum pedal assembly as well as the six-speedโs billet shifter arm.
It inspired him to sell off the stroker LS and gearbox that were in the Trans Am at the time so he could build something bigger and better, which in turn set off a string of different engine combinations. โSince 2014, Iโve probably had about 15 different motor and turbo setups in that car,โ he notes. โWith my personal stuff, I generally try to approach these builds by thinking about what I havenโt really seen before, and how I can do things better than the closest approximation. With this car, I kind of wanted to it be an interpretation of what it might be like if GM were to build one today. I also wanted it to be a kind of a โtriple threatโ โ something I could daily drive, take to a road course if I wanted, or run down the drag strip and make respectable numbers with. Drivability was important, and so was durability. Itโs gotta live. Iโm really hard on parts because I drive like Iโm still 16!โ
These days the Trans Am gets its motivation from a 427-cube Dart iron block LS with a Callies crank and rods, valvetrain components from Texas Speed, cylinder heads from Frankenstein Engine Dynamics, and a pair of 76mm Xona Rotor turbos, a combination which recently lit up the dyno with 1398 rear-wheel horsepower. โIt might be more like 1600,โ he says. โIt was spinning the tires on my dyno, so we decided to stop there.โ
โIโve made it my mission to get out to LS Fests,โ he says. โWe brought four cars with us for this one, and Iโm hoping to bring a few more next time around.โ
The LS is backed up a Tremec T-56 six-speed manual gearbox, which sends the power to the rear wheels through a Ford 9-inch rear end. As you can imagine, channeling roughly 1500 horsepower through a manual gearbox has the potential to make the Pontiac a bit of a handful, so Jewart turned to Holley Performance for a Dominator EFI system to help tame the beast.
โThe main reason I went with the Dominator is because I wanted to be able to set up traction control, and thatโs really hard to do with a T-56,โ he says. โWe use a lot of them at the shop, and I really like the flexibility that the system provides. Itโs been working great with this setup.โ
Since getting the Dart motor dialed in, the Trans Am has been serving as Jewartโs daily driver and a rolling showcase for the shop, but heโs already plotting his path to the next milestone for the car. โEverything in this car is rated to 2000 horsepower, and I kind of want to see how true that is,โ he tells us. โThis time around I think Iโm going to do a 455ci LS with bigger turbos. The car brings a lot of folks in, so Iโve got to keep it fresh.โ