This Big Block-Powered Chevy Spark Ran a 9.99-Second Quarter Mile
They may call it a Chevy Spark, but it's as much of one as Toyota's NASCAR racer is a true Camry. The Spark had most of its unibody chassis cut out and replaced with custom-built tubular steel and subframes. The seat is pushed back much further than in the standard car, since the subcompact now needs to accommodate a longitudinal big-block Chevy V8 and Turbo 400 sequential gearbox, which now power the rear wheels instead of the stock car's fronts.
The big block was originally quoted as a 632 cubic-inch an earlier video about the build, which would make it a 10.3-liter Chevy V8 crate engine with an astonishing 1,004 horsepower and 876 lb-ft of torque right out of the box. However, in the newest video of the track run, it is quoted as an 8.8-liter, which would make it a 540 cubic-inch block. We're unsure what happened there, but either way, it's enough to power the roughly 1,500-pound Spark, given that it's little more than a bare chassis and an engine. It's no wonder it's an absolute drag strip missile with all that power sending it down the strip.
After a few runs in the low 10-second range, McFarland finally broke the nine-second barrier, which likely makes it the most capable Spark on the planet. According to the YouTuber, the previous Spark quarter-mile record was 18.1 seconds. There's no guarantee, of course, as you never know what kind of wild contraptions people without massive YouTube followings have built. However, it seems unlikely that anyone else has had the desire to build such an absurd dragster out of one of the least-interesting hatchbacks in recent memory.
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Nico DeMattia is a staff writer at The Drive. He started writing about cars on his own blog to express his opinions when no one else would publish them back in 2015, and eventually turned it into a full-time career.
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