Hagerty Goes Inside the Shop: "Birthplace of Killer Customs"
Hagerty came out to Manteno for a full shop feature — "Inside Rad Rides by Troy, Birthplace of Killer Customs" — and spent a day walking the floor with Troy and the crew.
The piece covers the range of what happens under this roof: 200-mph street cars, AMBR winners, magazine cover cars, and the land-speed program that produced the Blowfish Barracuda for the late George Poteet. It also gets into the tooling and the process — the CAD work, the 3D scanning, the metal shaping, and the machining that let us build components in-house instead of waiting on someone else.
Among the projects Hagerty saw in progress: a third-gen Coyote V-8 getting a set of twin turbochargers, and Joe Lendway's "F87" Camaro, a long-running build powered by a twin-turbo Chevy V-8 with a 4L85E transmission, carbon-ceramic rotors, and Ferrari calipers.
Lendway, a GM engineer, has owned that Camaro since it was new. The design draws on IMSA racers of the '80s and '90s and on the F-22 Raptor — which is where both the "F87" name and the active rear wing come from.
If the engineering side is what interests you, that's a service we offer to outside projects too: CAD and 3D scanning at Rad Rides.
Read the full feature: Hagerty
