Hip To Be Square (Body)

An ’86 With The Heart Of A Z06

- Elana Scherr

A matte-gray expanse of hood blends seamlessly into a broad, open highway in front of the truck. It’s just waiting for a blip of throttle, or maybe even a foot firmly planted until either tires or nerve give out. There’s a 6.2L Chevy crate engine under that prairie-sized hood, and earlier, when we maneuvered the pickup out of the industrial office park where it was hidden, the sound of 640 supercharged horses through Magnaflow mufflers bounced off the concrete walls and rattled the vape juice in the neighboring units. Nobody even noticed, or if they did, they didn’t notice the earthquake was coming from an ’80s-era pickup. With its typical work-truck patina and body lines barely changed since the introduction of the squarebody design in 1973, there’s a truck like this in every neighborhood. That truck-next-door appeal is exactly what led Noah Alexander and the crew of Classic Car Studio (CCS) to choose the ’86 Silverado as their shop truck/parts tester, and later to loan it out for test rides, because it’s too good not to share.

If Alexander’s name or shop sound familiar, it may be because Classic Car Studio and its team of builders are the stars of a car show on MotorTrend (formerly Velocity) called Speed Is the New Black. If you’re rolling your eyes and picturing thrown wrenches and screaming fabricators, unroll, because Speed Is the New Black is a calm, feel-good show whose only TV tropes might be an excessive use of slo-mo grinding sparks. “We don’t do the drama thing,” Alexander tells us. “We just build cars.” Cars and trucks. A look through the CCS website shows that a good third of the vehicles built there are pickups.