Under Pressure

Alex short’s 1969 camaro comes up big on charisma.

- Jason Reiss

Alex Short has always loved the classic, clean lines of the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, and seven years ago decided to undertake the rebuild of a car he found in a local classified advertisement.

“I drove a shell of a ’69 Camaro,purchased for $2,500, into my home garage on a trailer. I began acquiring parts with my friends and family, trying to piece together what we could to make it look like the original ’69. We quickly learned our skills were mediocre, to say the least,” says Short.Underneath the shiny red paint the entire car was rotten, wrecking his original plan of building the car at home.

Enter experienced custom vehicle builder—and Alex’s longtime friend— Cam Miller of HS Customs in Logan, Utah. Miller was entrusted with the Camaro and a plan was hatched to create a ’69 Camaro like no other,dubbed Under Pressure. The car’s name has a dual meaning, according to Miller. The first is simple: a pair of turbochargers feeding the engine creates the obvious meaning. Bubbling under the surface is the second, subtle meaning: the challenge of building a custom ’69 Camaro like none that had come before it, without wrecking the timeless lines of the iconic Chevy. The pair went into the project with a plan of building a car that featured 1,000

horsepower—more power than any of the other cars the pair had built in the past, including Short’s ’58 T-bird, which was runner-up for Custom Rod of the Year with Goodguys in 2014. “While the shop was fixing what was left to fix as far as body and rust issues, I went to work on some ideas and renderings,” says Miller. “After about six months of going over ideas, Alex and I came up with a pretty wild concept.”