With the body and paint completed, we look ahead at the mechanical details of our NASCAR theme car.

Any day now, the March 2009 issue of Popular Hot Rodding will hit the newsstand. This is our annual body & paint issue, and we’ll be showing you all the details on how to slather on a nice black suede tuxedo. We decided to do the body and paint, along with the other visual treatments first. We were lucky enough to score a nice running car up front, so we’ll be doing a lot of posing at first—like a lot of our readers, we’re on a budget, and everything can’t always be done at once.

One of the things you’ll notice when you see our Laguna in the March issue is that there are a lot of cool surface treatments like spoilers, vents, decals, narrowed bumper, block-off plates, and other custom goodies. We won’t be explaining all those until the April issue comes out—so keep your eye peeled for that too. After that, we’ll bring you the build-up of our affordable 408ci small-block, which was screwed together by the experts at T&L Engine Development in North Carolina. It’s been dyno’ed, and makes 560 hp on pump gas from a 350 block, a street-oriented roller cam, dual-plane intake, and a Holley 850 double pumper.

From there, we’ll go to the engine/trans installation (which will include some more custom tweaks like cleaning up the engine bay), the interior freshening, the suspension, the brakes, the steering, and finally some testing. We may not run everything in that order, but those are the big pieces you’ll see. Obviously, we’ll have some hiccups along the way, which will make for some good editorial opportunities. By year’s end, we should have a pretty stout street piece that gets good fuel mileage, and can run in the 12s down the quarter mile.

In the meantime, drop us a note and tell us what you think!