My wheels: Chuck Steubing's 1965 Chevy Malibu

You and your buddy Jack Hansen both drive a Chevy Malibu, but your car has pretty much left street duty for the strip, hasn't it?

I've had it seven or eight years. When I bought it, it was just a body and we got it running in 11 days. It originally had a small block in it, and I drove it on the street some. Then it got a big block V-8. It had electric cut-outs on it that I could open up when I was idling around at the strip.

At some point, you decided to get serious about racing this car.

Well, we got a little carried away. We put it on a diet to get all the weight out of it that we could. Rodney Williams built me a 468-cubic-inch, 11-to-1 compression engine. He ported the heads... it runs on 110 octane race gas and he estimates it makes about 700 horsepower. It runs a Chance 350 Turbo transmission with a B&M Megashifter, 29-inch by 9-inch Hoosier slicks and a 4:30 Ford 9-inch rear end.

So it must be pretty stout out at the drag strip.

The quickest it's run so far is 10.72 at 128 mph. It will lift the left front off the strip off the line. If it gets much faster, we're going to need disc brakes up front.

What about this beautiful paint scheme?

Well, originally it was a teal color, then it was Torch Red. Bullseye Collision fixed all the rust in it. My painter, Justin Titus, said he had a vision one night while he was sleeping and came up with the pearl orange and silver flames.

So it's strictly a race car now?

I sometimes show it. We took it to Afton and if I had charged a couple of bucks for every picture taken of it, I would be rich. We don't take it (the racing) real serious. If you treat it like work, then it's not fun.

This story was originally published February 6, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "My wheels: Chuck Steubing's 1965 Chevy Malibu."