TANDING OUT in the performance industry is a difficult task. You have to build better, faster cars than the competition and maintain a good reputation while doing so. One shop making a name for itself over the past few years is Calvo Motorsports out of Austin, Texas, specializing in Viper, Corvette and Cadillac performance. STREET / RACE recently sat down with Antonio Calvo, founder and owner of Calvo Motorsports, to talk about his passion in building cars and how his business came to be what it is today. |
How did you get into building and modifying cars?
I had always loved cars, my dad used to take me to the Jacob Javits( Convention Center) auto show in New York. Once we moved to New Jersey and when I was old enough to drive, I wound up getting a 1990 300ZX Z32 Twin Turbo near the end of high
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school. Man, that thing always had problems and we were always working on it. Right after I graduated high school, the turbos went out on it and the car sat my first year of college. Some of my friends from high school and I decided to pull the motor one day and we put in new turbos and bigger injector and ended up making about 530-wheel horsepower and 550 foot-pounds of torque. For being 19 years old, having a car over 500 horsepower was a big deal. But then it blew up three days later!( laughs)
I spent the next two years of college saving up to do a full build on the car. We ended up making around 680- wheel horsepower and then we hit it with a 150( horsepower) shot and it made just over 800 to the tires when I was 21 years old. It kept popping head gaskets and having bearing issues, so I eventually moved over to the Supra platform. I’ ve have owned two Supras since then. In college I
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worked at Full Race and that’ s where I worked on a bunch of Supras.
In 2010, I ended up moving to Texas to work for Boost Logic. I worked there for a little while; then COBB stole me for almost three years for in-house design and fabrication. I eventually just wanted to do my own thing so I wound up opening my own shop, Calvo Motorsports. At first, it was a one-man business doing fabrication and builds and I outsourced tuning until I met Colin Murphy. Colin was just a customer at the time and I was working on a car and having issues and he walked right over and fixed it. From there on out we started working together and he kept growing and learning all the new software and he’ s my main tuner now and his tuning company goes by the name of Ninjaneering.
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What type of work does Calvo Motorsports do exactly?
Basically, right now we have stopped taking in all the little jobs of fixing things. We are focusing mainly on our performance packages. We have our head-and-cam packages, we have our turbo packages for the Viper, and we have our CTS-V mail-order packages that are something new we started offering. The Viper stuff is all done in house because the cars are all slightly
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PHOTO: KEVIN COX |
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