I have a three-year-old son who can't say Malibu, he says MaliBoom so we named it the MaliBoom and it stuck.

My name is Dane Thompson, I'm from California, which is in So Cal. So my car is a 1964 Chevy Chevelle and we trailered this thing here on my borrowed parts, I'm on borrowed sleep, but we are getting it done. I bought this car to flip it because I wanted to get a 66' or 67' Nova but those are like a holy grail car.

My wife came home and instead of yelling at me to get rid of the piece of junk, she said "I love this car, can we keep it?" and I was like "No, I want to get rid of it and get a Nova" and then my son, at the time he was like two so he was hitting the fender with rocks and I'm trying to tell him not to hit the fender and I'm trying to tell her that we need to sell it, which is the reverse of the conversation that we usually have, then the light bulb went off, it had a V8, my son can't ruin it, and my wife is not yelling at me to get rid of it so I was like, this is my car so we kept it.

Another thing, I had a car that I was building and it was a high dollar car for me, maybe not for some of the guys out here or in drag racing in general, but for me, I was shooting for the best parts that money could buy for my budget and I had to spend two years of my life and never completed it, had to sell it like most guys in the hobby because life happens, I have responsibilities and family. This junkyard dog stuck around and I've used this and had more fun with this than I ever had with the car that I was trying to build to try to go fast, so now every time that I take this thing out it's not the fastest thing, we are not setting world records but it steadily improves, I get to smile and I get to come to events like this and not wish that I had a car, I have a car, I might not be the fastest one here, but it's faster than all the people in the stands and people, they disconnect, they think, oh if I want a car I need to run 9 seconds. No, you don't, run whatever you've got, if it's got an LS motor, bring it out, take it down the drag strip, it's about having fun, cutting the light, racing your buddies, run cars that are not fast. If you run a 9-second car with a 12-second car, yeah you'll be disappointed, but find some other pieces of junk, make some friends, and go have some fun. Do some burnouts, live a little.

So I've made a total of three passes, we're not making any boost, the best pass I've ran so far is a 12.8 at 110. I was here last year and I struggled last year too and my best pass was a 13.9 so we've already beat last years and hopefully, we can just go a little bit faster. We're swinging for the fences this year, we'll see how we do.

This is exactly how I got it, I actually build classic and custom cars for a living, so the gentleman actually contacted me and he got my number through the grapevine and I looked at this in a garage pretty much as you see it. He wanted to restore it for his kid for a high school career car to go back and forth from high school A to B and unfortunately the gentleman couldn't even change a tire or check oil and I looked at him and I just shot it straight and I said unless you really want to learn and stay up late and have headaches and have your kid calling you, just go get him a Honda Civic 4-door, good insurance, cheap on gas, he won't bug you, he can take the girls to the beach, he'll be good to go. And I said if you want to get rid of it give me a call. And he called me like three weeks later and I think his kid probably still hates me. Yeah I got the car and I was going to sell it but I still own it so I would like to go back one day and kind of show him what I did with it but then I think his kid would probably murder me at that point because he would be like "That's my car!"

It's a junkyard 5.3 truck engine so it's iron block, it's aluminum head, stock heads, stock internals, I changed the cam, it's an Elgin cam and they re-branded it, it's called a sloppy stage two cam so that's a guy I follow, some of the things that he does so it's a sloppy stage two cam, no head work, I do have springs, and that's pretty much it. So it's on reused head gaskets, reused torque to yield head bolts, which you are not supposed to do. Pretty much every part on the car aside from the new Holley Terminator X that I purchased and then I've got a fancy Holley intake manifold because I couldn't pass the deal, I got that used too. Everything else on here has been donated or it's used so that's kind of my MO, even though the valve springs on here came off my buddies race car and he couldn't use them for his application, I was like "I'm not afraid, I'll put those on my car" so this is like a second hand used race car so it's budget-friendly, I've been

building it for a few years.

So as you can see how slow the process is, this is as far as I've gotten in a couple of years so the budget is very low on the car but you know the amount of joy and smiles I mean, I do but a lot of work in it but it's a load of fun and ultimately if you are not having fun you are not doing it right.

Back home I have a small YouTube channel that I do, it's called Burndown and then I have an Instagram so I have a little following that we got generated and a buddy of mine, I was testing his, right when I put the turbo on, literally the first time I went out and it went right around the time that his consistently runs, and he's been running for a while so he hit me up for a grudge race, it was a 2016 SS2 Camaro E85 stick shift bolt-ons and he was like "Your time frame is here, mine is here, let's do it" I said "Perfect". He's got a small Youtube channel too so we promoted the grudge race and it was a best two out of three. So I beat him in two, I got him on the first one and then on the second one he red light so I basically won by default on the second one.

Well after that, I got called out by a handful of people and I knew this event was coming and one of them happened to be coming out here, the other guys were at home and they wanted to run but I barely had this thing running, barely dialed in, the Terminator X just dropped and I wanted to make some changes so I just told my buddy, you know, let's do it, I met him here last year, his Camaro is called the F Bum it's reminiscent of this, it competed in the 3K Hoopty challenge. I think he lost his race there and had issues, I'm sure he's still got issues just like I have, we've been going back and forth on the internet and we've both been struggling but I know that his car is coming and mine made it here before his and what he doesn't know, and he won't know until after he sees this is that I'm struggling, it's not making boost right now so if we raced right now he would whoop me but I will throw springs in this thing and pin it to win it. So we are going to have a good time so it's going to be probably possibly the two ugliest cars at LS Fest battling it out for the championship.

Everybody thinks it's the fast guys that are competing for the trophy, it's me and the F Bum with our turd cars. Whoever has the least amount of parts on the track at the finish line wins.