Donkmaster's 1987 Monte Carlo SS Hides a 118mm Turbo Behind Gold Wheels and 24-Inch Slicks

The best trick on Sage Thomas's Monte Carlo is on the ground. The 24-inch tires under his 1987 Chevy look like the hard, skinny low-profile rubber that comes on every big-wheel car. They are actually racing slicks made to look like street tires, as HOT ROD found when it walked around the car at the Big Showdown 4 in Texas. After a burnout, the magazine reported, they have plenty of stick.

That is a good summary of the man known as Donkmaster. Thomas runs In And Out Customs in Charleston, South Carolina, according to HOT ROD, and he has spent years arguing that big-wheel cars belong on a drag strip. His own black G-body is the argument with a turbo on it.

The car

HOT ROD Senior Editor KJ Jones looked the car over at the Texas Motorplex in Ennis on April 8, 2023, at the Big Showdown 4, a drag racing and content creator event presented by Boostane Racing Fuel. He described it as a 1987 Chevy Monte Carlo SS that looks somewhat stock at a glance and is tricked out underneath.

From the outside, it is a clean black SS on gold multi-spoke wheels with a matching wheel inside. The giveaways are below the bumper line. HOT ROD lists a coilover rear suspension and a 9-inch Ford rear end, the standard starting point for anybody planning to launch hard on a solid axle.

The engine

Thomas was not handing out his engine combination. HOT ROD said he was not very revealing about the LS under the hood, which Jones believed to be a 6.2-liter, other than the Mast Motorsports cylinder heads made specifically for it. The valve covers say Donkmaster and Mast right on top.

Per Thomas, a single 118mm Precision turbo is the only power adder the car needs. HOT ROD was not entirely convinced: Jones spotted a single nitrous solenoid on the firewall, guessed it might be a purge, and wrote that other nitrous parts were well hidden. Read that however you like. In grudge racing, keeping the other lane guessing is part of the setup.

A G-body in a donk league

Strictly speaking, Thomas's own race car is not a donk. HOT ROD's own definition, repeated at the Big Showdown, is that true donks are 1971 to 1976 Chevrolet Caprices or Impalas. Square late-1970s to mid-1980s GM cars, including G-bodies like the Monte Carlo, fall under boxes and hi-risers. Nobody in the pits seemed to care.

The racing association Thomas founded handles that question with classes. Dragzine reported in 2021 that his National Donk Racing Association splits cars into Donk classes for 1971 to 1976 Caprice and Impala bodies, G-Body classes for 1969 to 1988 cars including the Monte Carlo, Malibu, El Camino, Cutlass and Regal, and an Open class for everything else. The Donk and G-Body groups are each divided into Lightweight, Middleweight and Heavyweight based on power adders and modifications, for seven classes in all.

Dragzine also reported how the NDRA runs: clocks off, a set number of shakedown passes before eliminations, and pairings drawn by chip. Thomas told the outlet the association was started to bring more safety to big-wheel racing as the cars got faster, and that he wants racers spending on safety gear the way they spend on performance parts. Competitors are expected to wear NHRA-appropriate gear for their speeds. Most NDRA cars, Dragzine noted, are still street driven with full interiors, and many still have air conditioning.

Big wheels at the Big Showdown

The Big Showdown 4 put big-wheel cars on the same program as YouTube racers, roll racing, burnout contests and grudge races. HOT ROD reported a Big-Wheel shootout for cars on 22-inch and bigger wheels, run to the eighth-mile, with $2,500 for the win posted by the NDRA and Mast Motorsports, plus a $1,000 bonus from Donkmaster in the YouTubers vs. The World race. The headline match on the program was Thomas against Herman 'Demonology' Young and his supercharged Dodge Demon clone.

Jones explained why the big-wheel cars stick to 660 feet. The large-diameter, low-profile tires on these cars use a hard compound that is not built for high speed, and given how high-riser chassis are set up, an eighth-mile is about as far as anyone wants to go flat out. That is another reason the slicks on Thomas's car matter. They are the difference between a show tire that happens to be on a race car and a race tire that happens to look like it belongs at a show.

Why this car matters

HOT ROD's 2021 big-wheel coverage described Thomas as a legend of donk grudge racing and noted a reality show built around him. By 2023, the magazine was walking around his Monte Carlo with a camera at a major Texas track. That is the arc of the whole scene in two stories, and this car sits right in the middle of it.

It also shows the real formula. Keep the body looking close to stock. Hide the turbo plumbing as well as you can, put the right parts under the back of the car, and make the tires look like something they are not. The Monte Carlo SS was GM's street-legal nod to NASCAR in the 1980s. Thomas turned his into a big-wheel bracket buster with gold wheels and a 118mm turbo, and he still parks it next to show cars.