Class Act

Working-class Street Machines Like Chris Chlebek’s Homebuilt, 9-second Charger Are Here to Make Hot Rodding Great Again.

- Stephen Kim

All of a sudden, everyone’s talking about the “working class.” As pundits and pollsters so vividly demonstrated in November, white collar weanies don’t know squat about what working-class Americans value most. It’s not about red. It’s not about blue. It’s about taking the green you’ve earned with your calloused bare hands, then stretching it as far as possible through sheer willpower and determination. It just so happens that these bluecollar values tend to align quite nicely with building badass hot rods. So while the working class as a whole has to wait out four-year cycles to stick it to the Washington establishment, Chris Chlebek gets to stick it to the clean-fingernail collector set every day in his home built, 9-second Dodge Charger.

As a kid growing up on the family farm, mechanical aptitude and hard work were essential to everyday life. “On the farm, my dad and my uncles were always fixing equipment. We kept busy cutting and bailing hay, and whenever something broke, we were in a rush to fix it so we didn’t get behind schedule,” Chris recalls. Farm life and hot rodding went hand in hand, and the transition from heavy-duty machinery to go-fast machinery was natural for Chris. “I learned how to drive a tractor with a standard transmission when I was 8 years old. When I was 14, my cousin took me for a ride in his ’79 Camaro. It had an RHS 350 with a four-speed. Back in the ’80s, 380 hp was a lot, and I was amazed by how hard that car pulled when he got on the gas.”