As the man behind AmericanMuscleHD, an Instagram page which measures its followers in the millions, Garrett Reed of Atlanta, Georgia, has his finger on the pulse of modern hot rodding. But although his fascination with all things automotive started at an early age, he didn’t have a chance to dive into a project of his own until he got his hands on a 2011 Chevy Silverado during his college days.
“I ended up breaking the cardinal rule of not modding your daily driver,” he says with a laugh. “I had wrenched on some of my dad’s projects previously, but it was the first vehicle that I had really built up like that.” Packing supercharged LS power, an air bag suspension, and a set of 24-inch wheels, the truck found its way into the 2016 SEMA show when Reed was just 21 years old.
During college Reed also worked at a classic car dealership, a dream job which provided him with access to some of the most desirable muscle cars around. It inspired him to start searching for one for himself, but with the finances of a college student, his options were pretty limited. “I feel like we always want the unattainable,” he says. “I would have loved to have gone with a 60s or 70s muscle car, but I just didn’t have the means to go that route. So I started wondering, ‘Well, what’s the next best thing? What’s on the rise, in terms of popularity, that I can afford?’”
Reed attended LS Fest 2017 not long after, where he met some of the folks from Holley Performance and Detroit Speed. Still unsure of what platform to focus on, he asked if they had any suggestions. “The guys from Detroit Speed told me that they were working on some stuff for the third generation Camaros as well as the GM G-Body cars, so that kind of sent me down a path of considering those two platforms, specifically.” After determining that the Camaro wasn’t really his style, Reed set his sights on 80s G-Body coupes like the Buick Regal, Pontiac Grand Prix, and the Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
“I started putting the feelers out for a G-Body,” he recalls. “And a buddy of mine, who lived in Las Vegas at the time, hit me up one day to tell me that he’d found an ’84 Monte Carlo SS out there.”
Although it was a little rough around the edges, it was a complete running and driving car for a price that Reed could afford. At some point in the past, a previous owner had also swapped out the anemic 305ci small-block for a livelier 350-cube mill with throttle body injection, and that only sweetened the deal. “I took it home, did a burnout with it, and then we immediately started yanking everything out of it.”
He spent the first half of 2018 assembling the game plan for the build and reaching out to potential sponsors for support. Instead of focusing on building the car around a specific performance metric or racing discipline, Reed’s goal was to build a solid street machine that would showcase the best of what’s now available for these often-overlooked performance cars.
The Monte was getting around under its own power by the end of the year thanks to a Whipple-supercharged LSX376 crate engine from Chevrolet Performance, a combination which is good for about 650 horsepower at the rear wheels on a conservative tune. “The crate engine didn’t come with an ECU, so we had a lot of options,” he points out. “But we knew that Holley was about to come out with the Dominator system, so I ended up being one of the first people to get one. It has never let me down – even when I discovered that rain had been running down the firewall and dripping directly onto the connectors.”
Backed by a 4L80E transmission and a Currie 9-inch rear end, the project was far enough along in 2019 that he decided to take the Chevy out to Concord, North Carolina to embark on the Hot Rod Power Tour. Reed and his friends got there early to hang out and prep for the event, and everything was going great – until it suddenly wasn’t.
“We arrived the day before the event, and we had no issues with the car at all,” he says. “We go to the first day of the show, then park the car back at the hotel at the end of the day. The next morning, I woke up, looked out the window, and I didn’t see my car. I said to my buddy, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s where I parked the car.’ And then it hit me.”
Reed’s car, along with several others, had been stolen out of the hotel parking lot the night before. After contacting the authorities, the team hunkered down and hoped for good news. Hours went by with no updates, and eventually Reed gave up hope that he’d ever see his car again. “At that point I was basically just pissed, so we packed up our stuff and went back home. And the final dagger in the heart was that our rental car was a Prius!”
He soon got the word out to the online car community, and although there was an incredible outpouring of support, his Monte Carlo remained missing in action. Days turned into weeks, and Reed rightfully assumed that the Chevy was long gone. “About a month went by, and that’s an eternity for a situation like this,” he says. “But then I got a message saying that they’d found the car.”
