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Airstrip Attack: Reid Yoken’s ’03 Corvette C5 Z06

If you saw our coverage of Shift-S3ctor’s Airstrip Attack [1], you got a glimpse into the world of half-mile rolling start drag racing. One of the many people we met that day at Trona Airport in California’s high desert was Reid Yoken, who not only brought his 2003 Z06 Corvette out to take on some of the fastest cars in the Southwest, but did it ironman style, driving more than 170 miles behind the wheel of the Chevy to get to the remote Trona tarmac.

[2]

Yoken’s C5 features a 7-liter C5R block [3] – while these are something of a rarity nowadays thanks to their expense, when the LS platform was new, the factory race block was the only game in town for those looking for more displacement, better strength under boost, or both. And speaking of boost, a Vortech [4] YSi supercharger feeds pressurized air to the FAST intake manifold, delivering a claimed 960 horsepower to the dual disc clutch, and thence to the pavement.

[5]

Per Yoken, the car is still a decent daily driver, despite clocking speeds in excess of 180 miles an hour on the half-mile stretch of asphalt that normally sees Cessnas, not Corvettes. With tuner (and close personal friend of the Corvette Online staff) Ryne Cunningham of Cunningham Motorsports [6] behind the wheel, this ten-year-old Y-body proved that the C5 platform is more than capable of taking on the best the world has to offer in a top speed shootout, then driving all the way back home with the same reliability and comfort you’d expect from a family car.