Holley's LS Fest West kicks off the 2026 event season in Sin City and we’re going to bring you day-by-day coverage. Las Vegas Motor Speedway is the scene of the crime and the offenses include drifting, drag racing, autocross, off-road action, Burnout Wars, and a huge car show. The three day extravaganza caters specifically to LS- and LT-powered rides. All the weekend's events lead up to the crowning 3S Challenge Grand Champion for the participant who performs best in three distinct disciplines; autocross, drag racing, and a car control exercise.

Valley of Fire Cruise

The LS Fest Valley of Fire Cruise is an annual, informal, scenic driving event held that’s part tailgate party part road trip. On the Thursday before official proceedings kick off, the Valley of Fire Cruise allows enthusiasts to socialize and enjoy a low-key cruise before the weekend's high-octane competition takes over their bandwidth.

Participants drive from Las Vegas Motor Speedway through the picturesque red rock formations of Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park, offering excellent photo opportunities with one of the regular stops being the "Seven Sisters" rock formation. All in all, the cruise serves as a relaxed start to the, otherwise, action-packed LS Fest West schedule.

Beyond The Smoke: Terry Breezee’s LS3 Powered, C4 Framed ’62 Corvette

When Terry Breezee first took possession of his ‘62 Corvette, it was closer to a suggestion of a car… Humpty Dumpty in sheet metal.

“It was just bare fiberglass, piece of junk, and a frame when I got it,” Terry said.

That was back in 2009, but the idea started long before that. As a kid, Terry was hanging around a local drag racing spot when an older guy rolled in with a ’61 Corvette and put a hurting on everybody.

“I had a ’69 Camaro, and this old guy, about in his 40s showed up in a ’61 Corvette and was putting a whooping on us all,” Terry said. “I just fell in love with the car and said, ‘I got to have one of these.’”

He eventually did buy one in the late ’90s, but sold it to help fund building a new house. Years later, this ’62 gave him another shot at the shape that had stuck in his head.

Terry started by setting his ride height and some other must-haves. With the chassis setup in his garage he spent two years slowly getting it dialed in, adapting C4 Corvette suspension underneath. Using mostly all take-off parts from newer models.

Terry works as an excavating contractor, and that hands-on, figure-it-out approach shows all over the car. His son Ryan helps with the tech side of their builds, while Terry handles more of the mechanical and fabrication work. Between the two of them, the Corvette became a family-built machine with plenty of homegrown problem-solving baked in.

Power comes from an LS3 backed by a T56 pulled from a 2005 GTO. The ECU is a stock unit from a 2010 Camaro. Terry widened each corner about an inch and a half to fit 295 tires under the car, which is about as much as the early Corvette body would allow without losing the plot. The finished car weighs around 3,000 pounds.

LS Fest West was also the car’s first real event, which means Terry was still working through the usual new-build gremlins. He had a little trouble shifting into fourth on the drag strip and fought a sticking brake pedal during autocross before making adjustments to the linkage.

That’s part of the deal. A freshly finished car doesn’t become sorted sitting in the garage.

Finished in Mazda Soul Red with a removable hardtop, Terry’s ’62 Corvette has the look of a classic roadster, the footprint of a homebuilt pro-touring car, and the attitude of something that would make that old ’61 from his childhood proud.

Beyond The Smoke: Chris Hall’s ’91 Chevy S10 “Daily Driver”

Chris Hall didn’t set out to build an autocross truck. Not really, anyway. His 1991 Chevy S10 started life as a fun daily driver, which is usually how these things begin right before they stop being normal.

“I built it for a daily, just a fun daily,” Chris said.

Then his usual autocross car, a 1968 Firebird, went down for what was supposed to be a simple engine freshen-up. Like most “simple” car projects, that turned into a full engine build, which then got hung up in the post-COVID machine shop backlog. The Firebird ended up being down for three years.

“So, we ended up, well, I guess we’re racing the daily,” Chris said.

That daily-driver S10 now packs an aluminum 5.3-liter LS backed by a T56 six-speed. Underneath, it runs Ridetech rear suspension, UMI front suspension, Viking shocks, Corvette brakes, Apex wheels, and a 1998-2002 disc-brake Blazer rearend with an 8.5-inch 10-bolt. It is a tidy little parts-bin mix, but the kind of parts bin that makes sense when the goal is to make a small truck turn, stop, and survive some abuse.

The tire package is where the truck really starts to get interesting. Chris squeezed 295s onto all four corners, but not by accident. He pushed the bedsides and front fenders out about an inch and a half to clear the extra rubber. The result is subtle enough that you might miss it at first glance, which is exactly the point.

The idea came partly from Kevin Phillips’ little blue S10, a truck Chris first saw at LS Fest West years ago. When a set of marketplace wheels popped up, he decided to make them work. They were 11s, not 10s, but that only made the challenge more interesting.

Chris, who lives in Goodyear, Arizona, is originally from England and has been in the U.S. since 2002. Somewhere along the way, he apparently learned the classic American hot-rodding habit of making a perfectly reasonable vehicle progressively less reasonable.

The truck started with basic Belltech parts. Then came coilovers. Then more tire. Then more gear. Eventually, the little white S10 found itself running LS Fest West’s truck class. Last year, Chris finished seventh overall, a result that surprised even him.

“It doesn’t have a lot of power,” he said, “but because it’s small and light, it seems to turn fairly decent.”

LS Fest West Off-Road Shootout

Friday evening at LS Fest West went full-send once the Off-Road Shootout took over the dirt track. That’s what makes Las Vegas so special: while all this crazy racing is happening, an off-road circle track is only steps away.

After afternoon practice gave the drivers a chance to feel out the course, the night program kicked off with a two-lap warmup before rolling straight into head-to-head, double-elimination racing. With pre-runners and off-road race vehicles lined up under the lights, it had exactly the right mix of dirt, noise, and fun energy.

Win and keep climbing. Lose twice and start loading up your excuses. Through it all, Chuck Crossland was untouchable, taking home the Friday night win without dropping a single race.

The Off-Road Shootout returns Saturday night with a similar double-elimination format, giving fans another chance to watch these machines launch, slide, and claw their way through the dirt.

Beyond The Smoke: The Corvocus - Ryan Scheer’s LS-Swapped Ford Focus Is Part Corvette, Part Cartoon, and All Trouble

Saturday starts with this wicked mash-up.

At first glance, Ryan Scheer’s 2012 Ford Focus looks like something that escaped from a video game menu screen and somehow landed at LS Fest West. The wrap is bright, playful, and packed with old-school gaming references. It has a cartoonish charm to it—the kind of thing that looks friendly until it opens its mouth and you realize this cute little koala has fangs.

Underneath that Focus body is a 2002 Corvette chassis, LS power, a six-speed manual, and the kind of packaging exercise that makes you stare for a while before asking, “Wait, how?”

Ryan calls it the Corvocus, which is exactly what it sounds like: part Corvette, part Focus, and a pretty honest warning label for what’s going on here.

“So, it’s a 2012 Ford Focus, and it’s sitting on a 2002 Corvette chassis,” Ryan said. “Corvocus. Half of the Corvette logo, half the Focus logo.”

That sounds like the kind of idea you come up with late at night, then talk yourself out of in the morning. Ryan did the opposite. He started measuring. “The wheelbase was identical, which was amazing,” he said. “So, it made it the ideal donor for making a rear-wheel-drive Ford Focus.”

Ryan had already spent a lot of time around Focuses through his shop, Scheer Performance. He had done ST and RS conversions on sedans before and already had a widebody, bagged ST-swapped sedan of his own. But the idea of a rear-wheel-drive V8 Focus stuck with him, partly inspired by the wild sedan-based V8 race cars from Australia.

“I really wanted to make one of those,” he said. “So, then I started researching wheelbases.”

Surprisingly, the C5 Corvette measurements were spot-on. He picked up a flood-damaged, six-speed C5 Corvette and went to work cutting off the body. Simple, right? You know, in the same way building a ship in a bottle is simple.

The result is more Corvette than it first appears. Underneath, Ryan said it still looks like a Corvette, right down to the exhaust and original running gear. The car uses the Corvette body control module and harnesses, wired into the Focus doors, lights, key fob, and other functions. The LS1 is currently mostly stock, running a stock ECU, stock clutch, and stock transmission, though the engine had to be rebuilt after the donor car’s flood damage.

More importantly, it works like a car. Not a barely functional show prop. Not a “please don’t ask me to parallel park this” science fair project. Ryan drove it roughly 800 miles from the Fort Collins/Windsor area of Colorado to LS Fest West. “It has AC, heat, cruise control,” Ryan said. “I still got my radio, all the stuff, because we drove it here from Colorado.” It even knocked down about 26 mpg in sixth gear, which is both impressive and mildly hilarious considering the thing is basically a Corvette hiding in a Focus costume. Ryan did admit it gets a little rowdy in fifth, since the exhaust is nearly straight-piped.

Inside, the Corvette packaging makes itself known. There is no back seat. The driver sits far enough back that the seating position feels more like a two-seat Corvette than a compact Ford. Ryan wanted to keep heat and air conditioning, so the heater box stayed under the dash, forcing the dashboard and cockpit deeper into the cabin. To make the driving position livable, he shortened the steering column about eight inches, moved it up roughly four inches, and modified the pedals forward.

“It used to be where I couldn’t even get in it,” he said. “The steering wheel was like right here.”

Congrats to Ryan who, later in the day, took home the Late Model award in the LS Fest West car show.

The exterior is just as much a mashup as the chassis. Ryan designed the graphics himself in Adobe Illustrator, pulling from his love of Mario, Metroid, and classic game culture. A friend in Colorado, Hikame Designs, handled the print and install. Even the fuel door is borrowed from another corner of the automotive universe—a Dodge Challenger piece that worked because the Corvette fuel location landed conveniently on that side of the Focus body.

That’s really the whole charm of the car. It has Corvette bones, Ford skin, LS power, video game graphics, a Dodge fuel door, and absolutely no interest in brand loyalty. It is a rolling argument against taking this stuff too seriously.

And somehow, it all makes sense.

Introducing Holley High-Performance Car Care

LS Fest West served as a soft launch for High-Performance Car Care. We used the occasion to get bottles in the hands of event goers. The Holley Shine Shop was a wash station where attendees can test drive the products on their own cars.

We have teamed with Malco Automotive Detailing Products, a car care manufacturer that has been producing professional grade detailing products since 1953. This partnership allowed us the opportunity to chime in on the formulations of the products to ensure they deliver the results we know our customers want. This first wave of offerings consists of six products.

Wash & Wax

Holley High-Performance Car Care Wash and Wax is a 2-stage shampoo that combines a thorough clean and protective finish in one step, giving drivers a fast, efficient way to maintain shine before a drive, event, or weekend

Speed Wash

Speed Wash is a fast, waterless car wash solution that is great when your paint is too dirty for a spray detailer, but you don’t have access to water like at a car show or race, on a road trip, or anytime you need a quality high-lubricity wash without a hose.

Speed Finish

Speed Finish is a ceramic-infused quick detail spray designed to enhance gloss, repel contaminants and extend protection between washes, helping enthusiasts maintain a glistening gloss and hydrophobic performance between full, shampoo and bucket washes.

Tire Shine

Tire Shine is a versatile exterior dressing designed to restore a deep, rich finish to tires and exterior trim while protecting surfaces from fading and environmental exposure. Our high-performance solvent-based formula restores a deep, rich finish while drying quickly to help reduce sling and protect against fading.

Wheel Clean

Wheel Clean is a powerful formula designed to break down brake dust and road grime with ease. Its acid-free formula clings to the surface, dissolving brake dust, grease, and contaminants to restore a clean, like-new finish.

Interior Protect

Interior Protect is a 2-stage cleaner and protectant designed to clean and refresh interior surfaces do produce a natural look, without greasy residue, heavy shine, or using multiple products. Our advanced formula works great on dashboards, consoles, and trim.

LS Fest West Car Show

One of the big results on Saturday was the car show where 20 awards were up for grabs. The high number of worthy rides at Las Vegas Motor Speedway made it tough for the judges who definitely earned their pay for the week today. The images are captioned from left to right.

Autocross Shootout

The LS Fest West Autocross Shootout has a simple way of turning a good driver’s day sideways: three back-to-back runs, no touching the car, and no room for mistakes. A cone or off-course penalty can erase a weekend’s worth of speed in a hurry.

This year, Clayton Yates didn’t need the extra drama.

Yates, driving his 2019 Corvette C7 Z06, came into the Shootout fourth among the top five qualifiers. That put him behind some serious company. Last year, Yates finished last in the shootout; this year, he took the win.

“We were all thinking for sure [Danny Weller] was going to win,” Yates said. Danny came into the Shootout, quickest of the day.

Instead, Yates laid down a clean run when it counted, taking the Shootout win with a 30.5-second pass and no cones. That was enough to edge out the field, with Danny and last year’s defending winner, Duke Langley, only a fraction of a second away from victory.

For Yates, the win also showed progress. Last year, he made the Shootout but finished fifth out of five.“The car’s just getting better and better every year,” he said. Yates co-owns Down Force Coaching, which added a little friendly pressure to the whole thing.

“We got to drive good, or people don’t want coaching, right?” he joked.

Fair enough. This time, the coach backed it up.

Beyond The Smoke: Jose Rodriguez’s Piston-Powered RX-7 Budget Drag Car

Jose Rodriguez’s 1988 Mazda RX-7 is not trying to be precious. It is not a polished, overbuilt, spare-no-expense drag car with a parts list longer than the burnout box. It is a simple, white, LS-swapped FC that looks good, runs hard, and proves that sometimes the best recipe is the one that actually makes it to the track.

Jose started out as a rotary guy. That makes sense. RX-7s came with rotaries, and if you’re into them, they tend to get under your skin. But after owning a few and fighting the usual headaches, he started moving toward the LS world.

“I used to be into rotaries,” Jose said. “A lot of issues…” He started by LS-swapping one, then it snowballed into a Corvette project, and multiple LS-swapped Mazdas. “It’s just plain and simple and fun. They always run.”

At LS Fest West, he was dialing in a brand new setup, with a bigger engine and bigger turbo. Built around a 6.0-liter LQ4 with Summit Racing pistons and rods, King bearings, and a stock crank. Jose said there was no major machine work involved—just a quick hone, clean it up, and put it back together. It is controlled by a stock ECU, uses a homemade harness, and is tuned by friends at New Era Performance. There’s nothing exotic hiding here.

The car runs a Holley intake, 1650cc injectors, dual Walbro 525 “Hellcat” pumps in the tank, E85, and an 88mm Summit turbo. On the dyno, Jose said it made 803 horsepower on 16 pounds of boost, though they ran into spring pressure limits with the boost controller. Before the current 6.0-liter/88mm turbo combination, the car had gone 9.70s at 142 mph with a smaller 5.7-liter and 78mm turbo.

Backing it up is a 4L80E overdrive automatic. No trans brake. No wild tricks. Jose foot-brakes the car like a street machine. Out back, it still runs independent rear suspension, using a Ford Explorer 8.8 IRS with 3.31 gears and Porsche 911 Turbo axles.

Why not just go solid axle? Because the car was IRS from the factory, and Jose already had a solution that worked.

“It’s been on it for 10 years already,” he said.

Jose built the car himself, with New Era Performance handling the tuning and camshaft choice. Even the body keeps that same practical energy. It has always been white, though Jose gave it a quick single-stage respray after the car had lived a hard life, including two hood-flying-open incidents and a replaced roof.

Jose’s day job is running Underground Autowrkz body shop in Coachella Valley.

It is still street-driven, too. Jose said he once drove it to LS Fest, ran 10s all day, and drove it back home to the Coachella Valley. With the 4L80E, lockup, and overdrive, it cruises at 80 mph under 2,000 rpm.

“Say it ran a nine right now?” Jose said. “I could literally drive it home. No issues. No cooling issues, no nothing.”

LS Fest West Drag & Drive

Drag racing is easy to understand from the stands. Two cars line up, the tree drops, and the quickest one gets there first. Simple enough. But LS Fest West’s Drag & Drive class adds one important question to the mix: can your car make the hit, cool down, make another, and still act like something that belongs on the street?

The Drag & Drive class is built for street-legal LS- and LT-powered machines that live somewhere between “daily driver” and “racecar.” These are the cars that can cruise, idle, drive through the gate, then turn around and put down a serious number on the strip.

Before anyone gets to play race car, they first have to prove the street-car part. Competitors complete two cruise laps around Las Vegas Motor Speedway to show the car is more than a trailer-backed track weapon. After that, they get a short 20-minute cooldown before heading into three back-to-back drag strip passes.

And here’s the fun part: once the runs begin, the wrenching stops.

No laptop tuning. No popping the hood to fix a loose clamp. No tire pressure games. No leaving the staging lanes to chase a gremlin. When it’s your turn, you’d better be ready. Miss the call to the lights, and you’re done.

The winner is decided by the best three-run average elapsed time, which rewards more than one lucky hero pass. You need speed, but you also need consistency, heat management, and a car that doesn’t turn into a garage project after the first hit.

That’s the beauty of Drag & Drive. It doesn’t care what your dyno sheet says if the car can’t back it up. It doesn’t care how pretty the engine bay is if it heat-soaks into a paperweight. The format finds the cars that are genuinely sorted—the ones that can take abuse and come right back for more.

Awards are given for the overall quickest average, along with bracket-style recognition for racers in different elapsed-time ranges. So, whether it’s a wild turbo car, a naturally aspirated street bruiser, or a clean cruiser knocking down consistent passes, there’s room to compete.

At LS Fest West, Drag & Drive is the class for people who believe a street car should still have to step up, stage up, and prove it.

Burnout Wars

Smoke inhalation is a way of life for fans of Burnout Wars. Winds at Las Vegas Motor Speedway we’re strong enough to keep the burnout pit clear so the crowd to see the action unfold. Tires were abused as competitors vied for the Pro Class win.

Beyond The Smoke: The Mini Mullet Machine Is Exactly As Sensible As It Sounds

There are clean builds, there are clever builds, and then there are machines that look like creations that emerged from a late-night group chat and somehow became real. The Mini Mullet Machine falls squarely into that last category.

Built by friends for one job—Burnout Wars—it is basically an LS engine, four wheels, steering, front brakes, and a deep commitment to bad ideas done well. There’s no bodywork to hide behind, no luxury, and not much between the driver and the cloud of tire smoke he is about to create. It is part leftover dragster thinking, part VW parts-bin cleverness, and part “hold my drink.”

The guys use methanol, which keeps the engine cool enough not to run a radiator. It’s an amalgamation of ideas taken from dragsters and burnout builds.

The current setup is intentionally simple: a stock 5.3-liter LS backed by a shorty Powerglide and a Ford 9-inch rearend with a 3.00 gear. The rearend came from Speedway Motors as a kit, with cut-to-length axles and no rear brakes. Out front, the Mullet Machine uses a ball-joint Volkswagen Beetle front suspension, which gives the crew a compact, standalone front end to build around.

That’s where it gets really interesting. The car has dual master cylinders and two brake pedals, one for each front wheel. Since there are no rear brakes and the rearend is fitted with a full spool, the driver can lock one front tire, leave the other free, and whip the thing around into donuts like a mechanical carnival ride with poor adult supervision.

The steering shaft runs behind the engine. The crew built a chain-link steering setup with a 2:1 ratio. Instead of the usual three turns lock-to-lock, it now takes roughly one and an eighth turns.

“Your hands never actually have to move from the position you start with,” Goddard Wagner said. “That’s part of the reason we can whip this thing so fast.”

Goddard’s brother, Chad Wagner, handled the driving duties, and the family-built smoke machine is still evolving. The crew wanted to prove the concept before spending real money on it, but the plan is already to add a blower and likely move toward a Holley harness and injection setup.

That feels right. The Mini Mullet Machine may have started as a pile of parts and a terrible idea, but terrible ideas are often the best ones once they start making smoke.

For its first unveiling at LS Fest West’s Burnout Wars, the machine blew a head gasket. So, instead of packing up and going home, the guys bought a junkyard engine and swapped it in the pits. Almost as impressive as the car itself.

LS Fest West Drift Challenge

Drift Challenge at LS Fest, was one of the must-see events of the weekend. Over three sessions Friday and Saturday totaling six and a half hours of power sliding the field of 32 was determined and one round of competition had whittled it down to 16. Saturdays final elimination rounds cut the pairing down to the final two cars. And they were familiar faces.

Last year’s finalists, 2025 winner Logan Hunter and his Nissan Silvia staged against Rome Charpentier and his E36 BMW. With all the money piled up in the middle of the table both drivers were on their A-Game as some close-quarters drifting led to a One More Time. Logan was out front on the first overtime run in the first turn Logan made a big flick but Rome kept pace maneuvering right into the pocket and acted like Logan’s shadow through the transitions. With Rome as leader the BMW gapped Logan’s Nissan through the first turn who went a little shallow to close the gap in the Turn 2 transition. Rome hit the his clipping points and had plenty of angle, his efforts and Logan’s slight miscues flipped the script from last year and put the Drift Challenge crown on Rome’s head.

LS Fest West Drag Racing

The drag racing portion of our LS Fest West festivities were contested in eight classes with test and tune session mixed in for those who really want to run some laps in their rides.

LS Fest West Grand Champion: One Car, Every Discipline

There are plenty of ways to have fun at LS Fest West. You can make autocross passes, hammer on the drag strip, or go chase cones in the 3S Challenge until the tires finally beg for mercy. But the Grand Champion title is for the drivers who want to prove they can do more than one thing well.

That’s the hook. Grand Champion isn’t about one hero lap or one clean pass, rather it’s about taking the same car, same driver, and same general package through multiple disciplines and coming out on top.

Autocross rewards precision.

The 3S Challenge piles acceleration, braking, and car control into one short burst of chaos.

The drag strip is the simplest to understand and, for a lot of these cars, one of the hardest to master.

As LS Fest competition announcer Chad Reynolds put it during the awards, “The starting line was not your friend.” That’s part of the fun. These cars are built to corner, stop, launch, and survive, but LS Fest asks them to do it all in one weekend.