Garage Woolery

During it’s early days, the Garage Woolery Pitcrew Roadster was actually known under a different moniker:  The Super Chicken! 

The car earned this name because of it’s unusual color combination (at least for it’s time) of a white body, red hardtop, and yellow brake calipers.  The Super Chicken was a notable car at the time because it had fairly rare and unusual modifications done to it…including a Racing Beat Type 1 nose, flush rear bumper, altered lighting (front and rear) and 16″ wheels.  Many modifications seen on this car aren’t considered to be very special nowadays, but back in the 90′s this was fairly cutting edge stuff.  The car was a nice daily driver at this point, and had yet to be reconfigured by Garage Woolery to be a performance car.

Here are some old pics from the Garage Woolery web archives…

Old "Super Chicken" webpage logo, circa 1998

At the time, the Superchicken had a distinctive butt, modified to make it look as smooth and round as possible.  The rear end utilized a flush rear bumper, vintage style tail lights, a center exit exhaust (which weighed a ton), and a clear formed plexiglass cover for the license plate cubby in the rear.

  At the time, it seemed like the way to make the car more vintage and classy was to load it up with chrome accents.  The white accents in the interior were also influenced by the Koenig styling on supercars in the 80′s.  The white bar across the dashboard was done by Garage Woolery to this car way back in 1990!  The white on the instrument gauge pod was a very shortlived (one week) failed experiment that, unfortunately, lived on in these pictures.

…and yes, this car at one time in it’s past did have a stylebar installed on it.  Garage Woolery was a noob at the time, and didn’t know any better.

 Garage Woolery had changed out the stereo with a highly advanced head unit (at the time) that could actually play MP3 files!  By installing a flushmount 4-CD holder in the DIN tray below, the Super Chicken was able to carry around LOTS of tunes (for the day).  The Super Chicken did have some nice pedals that allowed for good shifting action, though.  These were put in after the car was upgraded with a lightweight flywheel and ACT clutch.   

 The Super Chicken Gets Boosted!

As the knowledge base of Garage Woolery grew, it was determined that the Super Chicken was too underpowered and heavy.  A concerted effort was placed into eliminating unnecessary junk from the Super Chicken in order to make it  better performing car.  The car was now destined to become turboed.

In March of 2002, the car was taken to Flying Miata in Colorado, where it received a new Mazda crate engine (eliminating the ’90 short-nose crank engine), some headwork, and a new FMII turbo system.

These pics were taken on a road trip back from Flying Miata in Colorado soon after the Super Chicken had it’s first turbo system installed.  At this time, the Super Chicken made 232hp, 211ft.lbs. of torque, and weighed 2150lbs.

This pic was taken of the Super Chicken while crossing over the Donner Pass.   Rumor had it that Mr. Woolery was ravenously hungry when this pic was taken…