Following in the footsteps of his father, Chad Henderson, both in his career and in his hobbies, young-gun Jackson Henderson recently completed a slick new small-tire build that will carry him forward in the Ultra Street ranks.
A fifth-generation farmer, 24-year-old Jackson works alongside his father during the day at their family-owned Henderson Farms in northern Alabama. Jackson grew up shadowing Chad both on the 8,000-plus acre property and at the dragstrip. A lifelong racer, Chad is well known for successfully campaigning his Buick Grand National in Limited Drag Radial and his passion for big horsepower trickled down to his son, as well.
Jackson grew up racing in the Junior Dragster ranks, and when he turned 16, his dad gave him a 1972 Chevy Nova that he has been running in the 6.0 Index class ever since. “We thought it would be cool to have two Grand Nationals, so we bought this car [a 1987 Buick Grand National] and have been building it for the last four years,” noted Jackson, who brought the beautiful black G-body home on Friday, February 10, 2023.
During that time, the GN had been safely tucked away at Chris Terry Racing in Trinity, Alabama, where it was stripped down and reborn in all its new glory. Terry fabricated the still-to-be-officially-certified 25.2 SFI cage to be both structural and safe for Jackson, and all of the odds and ends that comprise a racecar were painstakingly taken care of, all the way down to the Stroud Safety parachute and harnesses.
Under the hood, the Henderson family opted to run a small-block, single turbo configuration, and worked with Pete Harrell at Harrell Engine & Dyno in Mooresville, North Carolina, to put together the powerplant. Based on an LS platform, the 321 cubic-inch engine was filled with Ross pistons, R&R connecting rods, a Callies crankshaft, and a “special grind from HED” cam before its Jesel rocker-filled LS7-style heads were topped with a Holley intake manifold.
The combination wasn’t complete without a power adder of some sort, so a 76mm turbocharger was supplied by Jose Zayas at Forced Inductions and plumbed in to effortlessly amp up the small-block’s capabilities.
Producing plenty of power definitely wasn’t a problem for the Buick, but the men wanted to make sure they could harness it as effectively as possible. So, a reverse pattern three-speed Turbo 400 transmission from PTC was paired with the small-block, and joined by a matching PTC converter and Precision Performance…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at DragzineDragzine…