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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24 STREETRACE |