500hp Chevy Van With Armored Wheel Wells, Inspired by the Burnyard (From the Squarebody Syndicate)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] what's up guys larry chan here welcome to another episode of hoonigan autofocus we are at holly ellis fest west in las vegas we're actually at the drag strip right now um but the car that i'm featuring right now it's actually something that you guys wouldn't really expect so this actually won the burnout contest out here the cletus and cars event yeah you wouldn't expect a van to to do that but it did it won it put on a spectacular show made awesome uh tire smoke and burnout noises and all that and honestly at one point i thought you were gonna flip over yeah yeah it feels like it when you're in there yeah so um this is uh rob from square body syndicate what what is square body syndicate so square body syndicate is basically just the people's brand you know lifestyle of chevy trucks and everything from 73 to 87 and beyond it's just like a resurgence i guess in recent years with um old vans so we have the chevy van side and then you know about the dodge fan thing right especially the japanese dodge van i've heard and i've seen some video of it man pretty awesome yeah cause they call them dodgy ban that's all you know that's how they say it in japanese and you know with a japanese accent yeah in katakana it's dodgy ban awesome awesome but it the chevy truck scene is that something that you guys have been a part of for a lot of years oh yeah yeah my cousin joe created it just uh on a whim and then uh threw out a logo and it became an instagram phenomenon you know and then we built a couple trucks and it's gone on from there okay so let's go over this what did this start life as so it started life as a typical work van you know uh it didn't look like this but the same original paint and patina was kept except everything else uh underneath has been done suspension wise ridetech four link coil over custom front tubulars everything is lifted up so we can get it to squat right but yet still have the same geometry because part of it is that the realistically in terms of performance parts not many people make things for this correct correct so uh everything has to be one-off for sure to to make it fit or to make it work you know and it's just a it's creating that one thing that people wouldn't think of and making it different and doing it you know okay so what year is this one 72 this is a 72 chevy van and then uh in terms of like suspension coilovers uh what about the subframe is that all the same so it's all it's the original subframe just slightly modified uh this is a unibody okay but the back half is mini tubbed and then cut out and then replaced to put the four link in so that's how you're able to have this ride height correct correct interesting yep little helper air bags in there to kind of give it a little lift when you need it oh okay so this is in its lowest setting yeah yeah it's just a low setting yep it's you could see all of the remnants of all the tire that you guys shredded yeah so what's underneath there is pretty much a bulletproof steel wheel well and right here is about a quarter inch steel plate that's shaved down with a knife to a knife's edge so that when you do rip and shred a tire it'll cut it off so we don't rip the body apart no way that's some that's kind of what i normally see on australian burnham oh yes we didn't have no idea yeah because they they have to armor it because with the wheel speed potentially at whatever 200 miles an hour it could really damage the vehicle or you know somebody could get hurt with tires coming apart but this van was it built for this kind of duty only it was built to drive on the street and do burnouts and it was inspired by going to sema and being at the hoonican pit and seeing what zach was doing and doing a ride along with zach so he kind of he kind of put this see planted this seed and this is what we came up with for an idea wow well i'm glad uh we could inspire you absolutely to build something like this i think that's pretty awesome um let's check out the motor yeah we are ls fest after all got to give it the fonz so 6-0 with the bfd cam long tube headers run on regular pump gas probably some somewhere around 500 maybe a little more horsepower with a 4l it looks every bit of 500 horsepower when you're on this thing oh my god i cannot believe how fast it spins out the g-force is insane when you're in that seat okay i also noticed you still have air conditioning in here absolutely gotta have comfort features so how is it that you were able to fit this motor in here because what was the original motor in this street six okay and then three feet on the column straight six how much horsepower did that make what was they like 125 horsepower or something like that so potentially to the wheels you have over five times the horsepower that this originally saw it's it's uh and then of course you upgraded the brakes too huh yeah bear brakes uh the remastered cylinder um and it is drums in the back but uh disc in the front and cause originally did it come with drums in the front too uh some of them did yeah yeah yeah and no power brakes all bare minimum no power steering no power brakes no air conditioning yeah just a just a van to haul and this i think we got this one out of uh tucson arizona so besides the wheels what other exterior additions or modifications did you guys do you know just we wanted to keep it very original and very clean but if you look at the grill right here we just put a little duct work in here metal ductwork to just get as much fresh air that's tubed up here so that we keep we keep as much fresh air going in there as possible because in that small space there's not a whole hell of a lot of room for airflow is this grill original yeah that is the original grill it's in pretty good condition yeah yeah i mean that's how it came just clean it up a little bit huh and what about everything else like this is original badging yep original badging yeah yeah everything on the outside is all original and then you guys commissioned somebody to paint this yeah yeah a guy hamilton art out of prescott arizona did a great job on that it's the patina is really really nice it's very pleasant and especially on this side it just looks you couldn't really replicate that huh mother nature's paint job you know there's there's no duplicate in that absolutely so tell us about the wheel and tire setup here so this is what we'll normally run just to drive it around and it they're just a 50 series 15 inch small tire and just with the right offset uh to tuck up in there and uh and give it that that stance that look you know and that's what we're going for and then multiple tries on the front to get the right tire to look right you know with with turning and not rubbing and not bottoming out so 205 60 15. yeah yeah pretty much the biggest you can run yep and those are 295 50 15s in the back oh wow okay and i'm guessing that's still probably not enough tire to keep it uh in terms of traction you know uh this thing just wants to break loose every time you press that pedal no matter what your your it's letting go can we take a look at the inside yeah this is honestly the best part of this van it's so pretty inside and it's so finished not yet it's almost almost we still got a lot more to do so because you guys actually use this as a merch van also huh yeah today especially with the wind man it worked out great okay so what's going on here this is is this a fuel cell yeah this is a fuel cell with the holley in tank pump and holley system um then we kind of made this like hey man let's make this useful so uh we kind of like you know because we know well we do a lot of pickup truck stuff so we kind of just said let's take and make like a little pickup bed in here fold down front so we can get some use out of it just to go up over to fuel cell and then the other thing was well if we're going to be burning out and trashing tires all the time then then let's set it up to where we have our spares so that's what we did we got spares spin them well these are the ones we had yesterday what no way okay so you can actually put the used burnout tires back in it and it's not damaging anything else but it's actually it's kind of fun because it's proudly on display yeah absolutely and you were really really close maybe yeah honestly like 10 seconds away from it really flaw on that tire it totally really felt like that i did blow it or because of the noise that was coming out i mean this thing it was it was so loud inside that i i stopped because i didn't want to start running the rim man i mean i could have but uh you know you know i do have to say i love uh what great lengths you go to to even keep it looking good on the burner tires yeah yeah that's cool man i mean because these wheels aren't the exact same wheels but they they replicate the original what we usually run uh and then so later on we'll get these swapped out and we'll put a set of burnout tires up there ready to go so this is all fab work from cisco he did he you know you get an idea and he's like yeah i could do that and he just he just nailed that reinforced even from the top the wheel wells okay yeah so this is actually when you can see the reinforcement so this is what you mean it's the the the sheet metal here and then it's reinforcement just on top and on the bottom bottom as well all the way around and so you got to have your jack with you you got to have your impact with you and a little bit of fire safety right you legitimately have everything you need to go to a burnout competition you're bringing everything you can also probably bring you can bring coolers you can bring a lot of other things chairs and whatever but you have a toolbox here incredible and it's so finished too this wood is super nice that's the nice thing about these vans they have so much room but yeah talk about style can we take a look at the front uh driver side area okay first thing i noticed this badge is so cool correct so there's a lot more modifications we do inside to do a personal touch and then just elevate the comfort level and features in the van which we started with the seats nos material inserts and also the outer vinyl wait so this is original old stock original material wow how did you guys find this uh it took a while and when we found it we bought some stockpiles of it so we have it for this build and future builds but you just found the material and you had somebody reupholster this and remake this duplicated exactly yeah yeah yeah totally so much thought went into something simple like that the uh the syndicate van that you see there that's actually cut from billet it matches so well with the interior this dash is still in really good condition original dash original dash huh and and the doors all of it i love the color so much so this is kind of where i see you guys did a little bit of modification potentially to have some more room yeah in the engine bay for the long tube headers yeah yeah we needed to make some clearance there but still have enough room for at least your foot um so this was completely modified um the air conditioning unit had to fit up under there and not only that when we when we did want to drop it naturally you got to raise your suspension up so that's actually a mini tub oh this is all raised up too oh okay yeah got it what else do we have going on so we got custom one-off dakota digital syndicate series gauges for this van that were made and then a crawl chrome i did it steering column wow i love that wheel so much and that's just something that we picked up you know at a swap meet man and just fell in love with it we're like yeah that fits let's do it the wood is amazing it's like a puzzle uh it's like a puzzle it's all puzzled together yeah um this is incredible i can't believe that this can't be original this is original how's it in such good condition you just you luck out and you find that stuff you know you just luck out and find it and the gauges are just so good looking that is something else so you guys make those for other van owners um we can we can yeah absolutely we have a full line of gauges for the chevy trucks pickup trucks as well that are rarely available as well as the steering columns okay and then ac controls all of that is there yep and that's all old air products there's those are great guys and you can just about fit those units in anything um so then um original radio oh this is our restaurant yup does it still work it's a good question i haven't tried it actually and then we're still like i said we're not 100 finished so we're coming up with ideas for center console you know little cup holders and all and then um we'll wind up probably with uh um some sort of screen we actually have a full 5 000 watt kicker system from kickr that we're going to install here in this thing real soon that's why that gap is there because that's where the base box is going to go in between there and fit all of that so we got all that air flow amps will go underneath this deck here got it then the headliner we'll have a bunch of interior lights and i think what we're going to wind up doing is because the same soaps kind of get close to rolling it i think we're going to just add a roll bar in here just in case because if we get get a little squirrely and really want to put on a shell maybe we'll lay it on its side the amount of power that you're insane by the way the amount of power i i don't think people really understand i mean there there were some crazy cars that entered this burnout competition uh over the the competition um over the weekend but the the show that you put on even though we had some crazy sustained 40 50 mile per hour winds yeah you still made enough smoke to disappear you know and i'm i'm on the the sidelines trying to get pictures of you but you keep looping around and disappearing and i'm i don't even know where you went but i mean i think that's so awesome that you created this burnout machine um but it looks the part it's not ratty and not not just uh quickly put together you know it's actually a very well thought out project so so many things about it even like this it being original it's in such good condition yeah totally totally original cool well thank you so much for showing it to us oh my pleasure man awesome you guys are great i love it what a cool what a cool build absolutely so do this yeah we'll open it up wow even this is all finished incredible kind of do all this with the thought what would have gm done or if we worked for general motors at that time what would what would we do and this and it's what we you know come up with in ideas and just float around and you do it and this evens in hinged so you can unbolt it flow it down because if you want to get something long in there you got it well because this is one of those things i love bringing this up in our videos uh a lot of the cars that we feature potentially they were ordinary vehicles that were never really looked at in a special way right how many of these you think existed or or they just got scrapped and they got junked and they they were worthless at one point when you think about it most of them probably were like fleet vehicles so whether you delivered bread newspaper milk produce packages or just used as shop delivery vehicles parts runners you know they just get used and abused banged around and then something goes wrong they just put them inside and then yeah they got squashed so they're they're hard to find yeah but now looking at this almost 50 years later now it's become something special something rare and something that was super pedestrian has become really extraordinary it's a great way to think about it man i mean it's cool i'm glad that you guys gave it a second life and it's gonna live on and it's going to make mini smiles uh when you when you light it up in this thing i'm i bet you when you first pull up people are like what is this guy doing he's coming out in an old work van what is he what is he going to do you know but when you light up those tires my god hey that's what is amazing that's super cool please people put a smile on her face you know and and uh and that and that that that's full enjoyment for me you know and the adrenaline rush when you're doing it it's a blast well if you guys want to support uh square body send a kit if if you guys want to support square body syndicate uh definitely check out you guys have a website yeah website in ig is the same square check out the website they have merch they have gauges you guys have so many little things that you can use you know for your old chevy truck and van builds yeah and uh any questions any uh we we try to answer every one of them and uh yeah definitely and we appreciate we appreciate the support man that's what keeps us going is what makes us do it you know uh having that having that drive is is seeing the people's reaction and the love you know and that's what we do man we love it awesome well this was the last feature from holly ellis west west and uh of course you saved the best for last this is one of my favorite if not my favorite vehicle here it's just so cool to see um yeah thank you so much for bringing it out my pleasure man thank you for having me [Music] [Music] [Applause] me

Channel: Hoonigan AutoFocus

Views: 114,793

Rating: 4.9375215 out of 5

Keywords: Squarebody, Square Body, squarebody syndicate, chevy van, squarebody van, LS Fest, LS Fest West, v8 swapped van, V8 Chevy van, c10, c10 van, 6l LS, 6 liter LS, Holley, Holley LS Fest West

Id: 0l6howKV3Ho

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021