Roadkill Hid an Illegal Race Car Inside a 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo — Then Almost Lost It on the Freeway

A banned oval-track racer with no VIN gets a second life wearing a 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo body on MotorTrend’s Roadkill. The fix worked almost too well — right up until something nearly let go at highway speed.

There is a very specific kind of problem that only a garage full of hot rodders could solve: a race car so purpose-built for competition that the government refuses to let it exist on public roads. That was the exact situation the crew at Roadkill found themselves in after buying a late-model oval-track racer with no title and no VIN — a car they could not legally register, insure, or drive anywhere near a highway. Rather than let a perfectly good race car rot in a trailer, they did the only thing that made sense to them: they peeled a 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo body off a donor car and dropped the whole outlaw racer underneath it, using the Monte Carlo’s paperwork to make the combination street legal. Fans immediately nicknamed the result “the Nascarlo,” and the build has stuck around in Roadkill lore for a decade, long after the episode that created it first aired.

The car isn’t subtle about what it is. It wears the unmistakable proportions of an early-’70s Monte Carlo body — a shape that spent its factory life as a comfortable, chrome-heavy personal luxury coupe, about as far from a circle-track brawler as GM ever built on the same platform as a muscle car. Stuffing a real oval-track chassis and running gear underneath that body wasn’t a restoration or a resto-mod; it was a bureaucratic workaround dressed up as a build, and it turned into one of the most talked-about episodes in the show’s history.

A Race Car With No Right to Exist on the Street

The video comes from Roadkill‘s Episode 46, “Street ‘Legal’ Stock Car Body Swap,” which first aired on the Motor Trend Channel on December 25, 2015. According to the episode’s own description, hosts David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan had been planning the build for three-plus years after buying a late-model circle-track race car they wanted to drive to the Deep South. The problem was immediate and absolute: the car had no VIN, which meant no title, no registration, and no insurance — nothing that would let it legally touch a public road.

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Their fix was almost comically direct. Instead of trying to paper-trail their way around the VIN problem, they gave the race car a body that already had one. A 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo shell went on top of the oval racer’s chassis and drivetrain, and because the Monte Carlo’s VIN plate was the one doing the legal talking, the finished car could be insured, registered, and driven on the street — while still being built to race on a dirt oval. The crew christened it “the Nascarlo,” and the name has followed the car ever since.

The Show That Made This Kind of Absurdity Normal

Roadkill built its entire reputation on exactly this type of problem-solving. Launched by Motor Trend in 2012 and hosted by veteran automotive journalists David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan, the show’s format was never about polished restorations or concours-ready paint jobs. It was about buying cheap, often broken cars sight-unseen, fixing just enough to make them move, and then doing something with them that no sane shop manual would ever recommend — road trips in cars with no brakes, engine swaps finished in a parking lot, and builds that existed purely because the hosts thought the idea was funny enough to try. By the time Episode 46 rolled around in December 2015, the show had already built an audience that expected exactly this kind of lunacy, which is part of why a VIN-swap body-donor stock car didn’t feel out of place in the lineup.

That reputation matters here because the Nascarlo wasn’t an isolated stunt. It fits into a broader pattern across the show of taking a mechanical or legal obstacle and solving it with the cheapest, weirdest fix available rather than the “correct” one. A race car with no VIN is, on paper, an unsolvable problem for anyone who wants to drive it on a public road. Roadkill‘s answer — find a different car that already has the paperwork and physically combine the two — is the kind of lateral thinking that turned the show into a cult favorite well beyond its original Motor Trend subscriber base.

Why a 1970 Monte Carlo Was the Right Disguise

The Monte Carlo doesn’t usually get mentioned in the same breath as Chevy’s genuine muscle cars, but its 1970 debut year makes it an interesting choice of disguise. Built on GM’s A-body platform alongside the Chevelle, the first-generation Monte Carlo was pitched as a personal luxury coupe rather than a performance machine — long hood, formal roofline, standard V8, and an options sheet aimed more at comfort than competition. That same platform kinship with the Chevelle, though, meant the Monte Carlo’s unibody and suspension mounting points weren’t far removed from cars that actually did race, which is part of what made it a workable shell for a circle-track chassis to hide inside.

That contrast is exactly what makes the Nascarlo memorable: a body designed to coddle commuters, running gear designed to survive a dirt oval at speed. It is street legal in the most literal, loophole-driven sense of the word — legal because the paperwork says so, not because anyone would mistake it for a factory car if they looked underneath.

Circle-track racing itself has a long history of exactly this kind of improvisation. Weekend short-track racers have swapped bodies, chassis, and drivetrains between cars for decades, often for the same reasons the Roadkill crew ran into: a chassis that works but a body or title that doesn’t, or vice versa. What usually stays confined to a local short-track pit area, though, rarely ends up driven on an actual interstate afterward. Most body-swapped oval cars are built to survive 25 laps on a quarter-mile dirt bullring, not a sustained highway cruise at speed — which is part of what made the Nascarlo’s street-driving segment of the episode as tense as it was entertaining.

The donor race car itself reportedly started life as a newer Monte Carlo-based oval racer, according to fans who have discussed the build on classic car forums in the years since — meaning the finished Nascarlo is, in a strange way, two different generations of the same nameplate welded into one vehicle, even if the chassis underneath carries decades-newer racing hardware than the 1970 body wearing it.

The Ending That Keeps Fans Asking for a Rebuild

As the original episode description bluntly puts it, the Nascarlo’s debut “does not all end well.” Longtime viewers in the comments still bring up a scare from the car’s early driving: several describe a front suspension component coming loose at highway speed, with more than one commenter saying they’re simply relieved nothing let go while the car was moving fast on the freeway. Whatever the exact mechanical culprit, the moment was dramatic enough that it has stuck in viewers’ memories for a decade.

The car’s story didn’t end with that episode, either. Years later, Finnegan brought the Nascarlo back for a rematch against another Roadkill-built oval racer, the Death Metal Charger, on Faster With Finnegan — a crossover race that reportedly wrecked the Nascarlo again, only for the crew to rebuild its nose and keep racing it rather than retire it for good. That willingness to keep patching up and re-racing a car built from a legal loophole is a big part of why fans still comment asking to see it rebuilt and brought back once more.

What Makes the Nascarlo Still Worth Talking About

Plenty of builds disguise one car as another for shock value. The Nascarlo did it to solve an actual legal problem, and the solution happened to look like something between a muscle car and a NASCAR stocker rolling down a residential street. That combination of practical hot-rodding logic and sheer visual absurdity is exactly the kind of story that has kept Roadkill relevant among muscle car and hot rod fans years after any individual episode first aired — a reminder that the most memorable builds aren’t always the cleanest or the most expensive, just the ones with the best excuse for existing in the first place.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.