Kaotic Speed's Bill Collector Is a Gold 1971 Chevy on 26s With 2,200 HP and Corvette ZR1 Brakes

The name is the joke and the warning. Kaotic Speed's Bill Collector is a gold 1971 Chevy sitting on 26-inch Forgiato wheels, the kind of car that looks like it was built to idle through a show lot with the trunk rattling. That is exactly what its owner wants you to think until the tree comes down. Shane Speed told HOT ROD he had won about $25,000 with it since he finished building it.

Speed runs Kaotic Speed, a donk shop in Fayetteville, Georgia, on the south side of metro Atlanta. HOT ROD's Johnny Hunkins went looking for donk racers at LS Fest after watching a rust-colored 1973 Impala from Miami on big Rucci Forged wheels roll through the quarter-mile traps well into the 10-second zone. He never found that driver. He found the Kaotic Speed crew instead, and the Bill Collector became the centerpiece of the magazine's June 2021 look at big-wheel drag racing.

Show car from 20 feet

HOT ROD describes the Bill Collector as a gold 1971 Chevy Impala that would fit right in at a big-city car show, and that is the whole idea. The first thing anybody sees is a set of Forgiato Twisted Maglia wheels, 26x9 in front and 26x12 out back, wrapped in Lexani tires. From across the lot it reads like any well-done donk: tall stance, clean gold paint, chrome and a lot of wheel.

Get closer and the race car starts to show through the spokes. Behind those 26s are carbon-fiber brakes from a 2019 Corvette ZR1. That is not a bolt-on kit. According to HOT ROD, Speed made the hubs and mounting brackets himself on a mill in his own shop. Putting supercar brakes behind a 26-inch wheel on a full-size 1971 Chevy takes real machine work, and it is the kind of detail that separates a racing donk from a parking-lot donk.

Race car from the driver's seat

Open the door and the show car disappears. HOT ROD lists a carefully built rollcage, a pair of Kirkey racing seats, a Hurst Pistol-Grip Quarter-Stick shifter, a Longacre dirt-track steering wheel and plenty of engine management electronics. There is no pretending this interior is for cruising to the club meeting.

Under the hood is a 427-cubic-inch LS V8 built by Steve Morris and topped with an F3 ProCharger. HOT ROD reports it makes 2,200 horsepower at the flywheel on methanol. A Reid-case Powerglide built by FTI handles the torque, and a Fab 9 rear end carries 3.90 gears.

Making that power work on tall wheels is where most big-wheel cars fall apart. The Bill Collector uses a custom triangulated four-link rear suspension, Afco adjustable coilovers from Troy Perez's Innovative Racecraft shop and an anti-sway bar. A triangulated four-link locates the axle without a separate panhard bar, and on a car carrying this much wheel and tire, keeping the rear end planted and straight is the difference between a pass and a wall.

Why a donk makes a good hustle

Big-wheel racing runs on assumptions. A heavy sedan with a high center of gravity, sitting on wheels HOT ROD guessed must weigh about 100 pounds apiece, looks like it should lose to anything with a real drag setup. Hunkins called it the drag racing version of a head fake: people with money see the wheels, decide the car is all show and put cash on the other lane. The Bill Collector's name is about exactly that transaction.

The car also fits the strict definition of the style. HOT ROD's explainer lays out the lingo: a true donk is a 1971 to 1976 full-size Chevy Caprice or Impala built as a high-riser, with 24-inch wheels as the bare minimum. A 1977 to 1990 Caprice is a box, a 1991 to 1996 Caprice or Buick Roadmaster is a bubble, and everything else built that way is a high-riser. The magazine traced the trend to South Florida in the 1990s before it spread through other Southern cities and then the rest of the country. A Georgia shop building a 2,200-hp, ZR1-braked 1971 Chevy is where that story ends up when the people building the cars start taking the drag strip seriously.

Chasing the Donkmaster

When HOT ROD ran its story in June 2021, Speed had a specific target in mind. Sage Thomas, better known as Donkmaster, runs In And Out Customs in Charleston, South Carolina, and was planning a car show and drag race called Donkmaster Invades Maryland at Maryland International Raceway in Budds Creek. Speed told the magazine he planned to bring the Bill Collector there on July 17 for a high-stakes grudge race against Thomas.

HOT ROD's story did not report how that matchup went, and we have not found a published result, so we will leave it there. What the 2021 story captured was a moment when donk racing was moving out of the back lots and onto mainstream programs like LS Fest, and the Bill Collector was one of the cars making that case with time slips instead of talk.

That is the real point of a car like this. Plenty of people still see a donk and think it is all wheels and no substance. The Bill Collector answers with a Steve Morris engine, a triangulated four-link and Corvette brakes tucked behind the spokes, and it keeps the gold paint and the Forgiatos because the disguise is part of the game plan.