1978 Pontiac Trans Am FAST EZ EFI Fuel Injection Overdrive Engine Upgrades

This 1978 Pontiac Trans Am rolled into V8 Speed & Resto Shop running like anything but a bird of fire — and rolled out with a FAST EZ-EFI fuel injection system, a 2004R overdrive transmission, and a COMP Cams roller valvetrain under its Pontiac 400. The upgrades are the kind Pontiac purists argue about for hours. See exactly what changed and why the team made each call.

A lame duck came into the shop. What rolled back out wasn’t just repaired — it was rebuilt to drive like nothing from 1978 ever could. This Pontiac Trans Am spent decades running exactly the way General Motors intended, which is to say, not particularly well by modern standards. The team at V8 Speed & Resto Shop had other plans for it, and the parts list alone tells you they weren’t interested in a cosmetic refresh. What actually changed under the hood is the kind of upgrade that splits Pontiac purists right down the middle.

From Bird of Fire to Lame Duck and Back

The 1978 Pontiac Trans Am featured here arrived at V8 Speed & Resto Shop in Red Bud, Illinois running its original setup — no overdrive, a carbureted Pontiac 400, and gearing built for a very different era of gas prices and expectations. The shop’s team, working under the V8TV banner produced by Kevin Oeste, describes the car as coming in “more like a lame duck than a bird of fire,” a fitting joke for a Trans Am wearing the era’s famous Screaming Chicken hood decal. Getting it back to bird-of-fire performance meant touching nearly every system that determines how a muscle car actually feels to drive.

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Why a Pontiac 400 Rarely Gets Fuel Injected

Fuel-injecting a Pontiac 400 isn’t a common swap, and the shop calls it out directly — “it’s not often to see a Pontiac 400 fuel injected engine.” The team used a FAST EZ-EFI 2.0 system, which replaces the carburetor with electronic fuel injection while keeping the factory-style intake footprint, letting the engine breathe and fire more consistently than any four-barrel carburetor could manage across a range of temperatures and altitudes. For a numbers-conscious Pontiac guy, that’s a significant departure from stock. For a Trans Am meant to be driven regularly, it’s the difference between fighting a cold start and just turning the key.

The Overdrive Swap That Changes Everything

Perhaps the bigger functional change is the 2004R overdrive transmission, which lets the Trans Am cruise at highway speed without the engine screaming the way it would through a factory three-speed automatic. Overdrive swaps are one of the most common — and most transformative — upgrades in the restomod world, because they solve the single biggest complaint owners have about driving a numbers-matching muscle car on a modern interstate. Paired with a roller cam and roller lifters from COMP Cams, the Trans Am’s 400 wakes up with noticeably less internal friction than its original flat-tappet setup.

New Gears, New Personality

New rear gears round out the drivetrain work, retuning the car’s final drive ratio to work with the added overdrive gear rather than against it — a step that’s easy to skip and immediately obvious when it’s missing. Supporting parts filled out the rest of the build: a B&M converter lock-up controller, a Tanks Inc. fuel tank with high-pressure pump and sending unit to feed the new EFI system, a Shiftworks shifter conversion kit, and Royal Purple assembly lube to protect everything during break-in. None of these parts show up in a photo of the finished car, but every one of them determines whether the upgrades work together.

The Parts List Tells the Real Story

V8 Speed & Resto Shop built its reputation on exactly this kind of work — not full frame-off restorations, but functional upgrades that keep a car’s classic identity while making it genuinely usable. Their shop sells the same parts featured in this build directly to customers who want to do similar upgrades on their own muscle cars, with installation and even transportation services available. It’s a business model built around the restomod philosophy: keep what makes the car special, fix what makes it frustrating to actually drive.

V8 Speed & Resto’s Approach to Restomods

Purists will note, correctly, that a factory-correct 1978 Trans Am ran a carburetor and a three-speed automatic, and that adding EFI and overdrive moves this car further from its as-delivered specification. That’s a real trade-off, and it’s one every restomod owner has to make peace with. What the car gains is reliability and drivability that no bone-stock ’78 400 ever had, especially in stop-and-go traffic or on a long highway run — situations where the factory setup was never going to shine, whatever the trim tag says.

What Gets Lost — and What Gets Gained

The finished Trans Am is exactly the kind of build that defines the modern muscle car restoration scene: not a museum piece, but a Pontiac built to be started, driven, and enjoyed without babying a forty-plus-year-old fuel system. For a car that came in running rough enough to earn a joke in its own build video, that’s the whole point.

A Trans Am Built to Actually Be Driven

This build also functions as a template for other second-generation Trans Am owners weighing the same decision. A Pontiac 400 EFI conversion isn’t cheap or simple, but V8 Speed & Resto Shop’s willingness to document every part used — down to the specific fuel pump and shifter conversion kit — gives other owners a real parts list to follow rather than a vague description of “we added fuel injection.” That level of transparency is relatively rare in the build-video space, where shops often keep specific vendor relationships and part numbers to themselves. For a Pontiac community that’s smaller and more specialized than the Chevy or Ford aftermarket, having a documented, replicable path to modernizing a numbers-matching 400 is genuinely useful information, not just entertainment.

What This Build Means for Other Pontiac Owners

Beyond peak power, the FAST EZ-EFI system solves two problems that carbureted Pontiac owners live with for the life of the car: cold starts and altitude compensation. A carburetor tuned for sea-level driving runs rich at elevation and can struggle to fire cleanly on a cold morning without choke adjustments most owners never dial in correctly. Electronic fuel injection compensates for both automatically, adjusting the air-fuel mixture in real time based on sensor data rather than a fixed jet size chosen for one specific set of conditions. For a Trans Am meant to be driven across varying weather and elevation rather than trailered to a single show, that adaptability is arguably a bigger real-world upgrade than the horsepower gain itself.

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