Big Chief’s CROWMOD @ Lights Out 7

Big Chief’s new Crowmod wasn’t just a replacement for his wrecked LeMans – it was a full rebuild around a twin-turbo Pontiac engine that survived that crash, wrapped in a lighter 1968 Firebird body. Taking it straight to Lights Out meant getting a brand-new combination race-ready under serious time pressure. Here’s the story behind one of drag radial racing’s most recognizable Pontiacs.

Big Chief from Street Outlaws took his shiny brand new Crowmod down to South Georgia to put on a show! Sporting a Pontiac V8 with big twin turbochargers hanging off the side, it was no easy task to get it race ready for the big event!

When Big Chief showed up to one of drag radial racing’s biggest showdowns with a brand-new car, most of the paddock had no idea what they were actually looking at. The Crowmod wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint on his old ride — it replaced a car he’d wrecked on camera, and it arrived built specifically to erase every weakness that wreck exposed. Underneath a Pontiac Firebird body sat an engine combination that had already survived one violent crash and come out the other side still making serious power. Getting a car this new and this radical race-ready for a marquee event in a short window is no small feat. What did it actually take to get the Crowmod ready to fight at Lights Out?

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Built From the Wreckage of Its Predecessor

Justin ‘Big Chief’ Shearer’s previous car, a 1972 Pontiac LeMans nicknamed ‘The Crow,’ got wrecked hard enough during filming that it needed a full replacement — but rather than just repair the old car, his team built something lighter and sharper from the ground up. The new car, wrapped in a 1968 Pontiac Firebird body and built by Terry Murphy, came in a full thousand pounds lighter than the LeMans it replaced. The heart of the combination, though, wasn’t new at all: the Butler Performance-built Pontiac engine, packing twin turbochargers, had actually survived the LeMans crash intact and got transplanted straight into the new chassis.

A Pontiac V8 Doing Real Damage in a Sea of Chevys

Running a Pontiac-based combination in a scene dominated by small-block Chevy power is its own kind of statement, and the Crowmod backed it up — Shearer drove it to the number-one spot on Oklahoma City’s 405 Top 10 list, ran it into the threes in Radial versus The World competition, and even brought it to the NHRA U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis to run Pro Modified against purpose-built cars that never see a street. Getting a car with that much new engineering ready to race at an event as big as Lights Out, on a timeline that short, is exactly the kind of pressure that separates a serious team from a hobbyist one.

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