Like many of us, Cameron Bishop’s obsession with cars started off with a Hot Wheels collection, but it was television shows like Monster Garage and Junkyard Wars that truly set him on his current path. Now the owner of Cuttingedge Hotrods and Fabrication – a Phoenix, Arizona-based shop that specializes in pro-touring-style restorations of the late 60s and early 70s GM platforms – Bishop says that his company essentially grew out of the side work that he took on while working at a local car dealership.

“In 2013, I built this ’32 Chevy with a C5 driveline,” he recalls. “It was chopped, channeled, and all of that, and I think a lot of local folks took notice of it. And once I finished that project, I realized that didn’t want to work for a dealership anymore. I had gone from being the general manager at the fabrication shop I had worked at previously to being the youngest guy in the building at the dealership, and I was tired of the egos of the management there. At the same time, people were starting to ask me for help with their projects based on the work that I had done on the ’32 Chevy, and it just kept growing and growing through word of mouth.”

The demand inspired Bishop to establish a proper business of his own in 2018. Soon afterward, he decided to start working on a personal project that would showcase the shop’s fabrication prowess as well as their ability to innovate. “I’ve always loved this generation of Chevrolet trucks, so that was the obvious option for this build,” he says. “In high school, I had a ’72 Blazer, and right now we’re currently building a K10 and four different first-generation K5 Blazers at the shop.”

But he also wanted to build something that paid homage to the flame-spitting widebody monsters that came to epitomize FIA Group 5 racing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a category where sports cars like the Porsche 917 and the BMW 3.5 CSL “Batmobile” earned their legendary status. Add a dash of style inspired by the wild Group B rally racing of the early 1980s, and the game plan for Bishop’s wicked C10 build was born.

“I really wanted to do something different; there’s a million C10 builds out there,” he says. “I didn’t want to end with something where people could say, ‘Hey look, there’s that gray C10 – no wait, that’s a different gray C10.”

To bring his vision to reality, Bishop sourced a running 1972 Chevy C10 from a local ad on Facebook Marketplace as well as a complete C6 Corvette Grand Sport from Copart, the latter of which would donate its powertrain and many chassis components to the project. “The result of committing to the idea, and being willing to chop it up. is that we could do this properly,” he explains. “That meant I could do things like put a 12-inch-wide front wheel on it that could turn lock to lock without rubbing. And I knew that if I used the Corvette stuff, I’d have a massive amount of aftermarket support available.”

And since Bishop planned to compete with the truck in series like Pro-Touring Truck Shootout, which uses a format similar to Optima’s Search for the Ultimate Street Car, the C10 would need to truly perform on the track and remain easy to work on. To bring it all together, he fabricated a custom chassis from 2x4-inch mandrel bent tubing and adapted the Corvette’s dry-sump LS3 V8 and close-ratio Tremec six-speed transaxle, along with its suspension control arms and knuckles. The front crossmember is a fully fabricated piece made from 4130 chromoly, but the rear crossmember comes directly from the C6.

“That’s mainly so I can still get the transaxle out if need be,” he says. “Serviceability was an important part of the design for me. The chassis is set up so that the center of it unbolts, and if you unbolt the motor mounts, the driveline stays on the ground and you can lift the rest of the truck up off of it.” Custom KW coilovers provide the ride height and damper adjustability, while Wilwood brakes are on-hand to provide track-ready stopping power.

Bishop also treated the 6.2-liter LS3 V8 to upgrades that included a Tick Performance Stage 3 camshaft, Brian Tooley Racing valve springs, and Radium Engineering fuel rails before dropping it into the C10’s engine bay. The upgraded mill, which he estimates to be good for about 550 horsepower in its current configuration, is fed through a pair of custom-fabricated air inlets on the front fenders. The power plant also sits about 13.5 inches further back in the chassis versus the factory mounting location in order to improve the 3550-pound truck’s weight distribution, and that positioning allowed Bishop to mount the radiator at an angle to force hot air through a large heat extractor that he fabricated for the hood.

The C10’s cab has been outfitted with an 8-point roll cage, Sparco race seats, and a fabricated all-aluminum instrument panel with integrated air vents for the truck’s functional AC. A 12.3-inch Holley Pro Dash has also been mounted above the transmission tunnel in order to put all of the truck’s real-time vitals in one spot. “I wanted to be able to monitor a lot of things, but I didn’t want it to look like a boat with an endless row of gauges,” says Bishop. “A lot of things needed to move around to make this setup work – the steering wheel’s centerline and the driver’s seat are both an inch and a half to the left of their factory locations, so an OE-style gauge cluster wasn’t going to work anyway. I knew this would get me the most information in the limited space that I had available.”

But the C10’s bodywork is perhaps the most stunning aspect of this incredible build. The truck is five inches wider than a standard C10 thanks to the widebody treatment applied by Bishop, which involved an extensive amount of custom work in order to bring his aesthetic vision to life. “The inner structure of the front fender is factory C10,” he says. “I did that so it would have normal mounting locations, and so it can be shimmed and adjusted like any other C10. The outer skins were done here with an English Wheel and a planishing hammer, and they were built to be spot-welded to the inner skins in the factory locations. These fenders come off of the truck like a factory piece would.”

The inner and outer sections of the bedsides were similarly separated so that Bishop could adapt the inside structure to the new tube chassis and make some tweaks to the skins before he turned his attention to the tailgate. “The factory tailgate is really, really heavy,” he points out. So I built a new one-piece tailgate with the same profile, but I used 20-gauge steel, so it’s much lighter.” The aluminum front roll pan and splitter are custom-fabricated pieces as well, while an APR Performance wing generates downforce at the rear of the truck. A set of wide custom wheels from Fikse round out the truck’s racy and purposeful look.

The project took about a year and a half from start to finish, and the final stretch saw Bishop burning the midnight oil in the weeks leading up to the 2022 SEMA show. “About the time I got the bedsides done, KW presented me with the opportunity to go to SEMA,” he says. “I had all of the engineering stuff finished, but there was still a lot of work to be done in 65 days, and I wanted to be able to drive it into the building. I started it for the first time on the night before the show and we immediately loaded it on the trailer after that. I left the house at about 1:30 in the morning and drove straight to Vegas. We ended up being the last ones in.”

Bishop says that the time since SEMA has largely been spent tying up loose ends and refining the chassis setup in order to extract every last bit of performance from the truck. Along with mixing it up at a Goodguys event as well as a local SCCA autocross competition over the past few months, he also got in the hunt for the Grand Champion trophy at this year’s LS Fest West.

“It was my first time going to an LS Fest, and I didn’t really know what to expect,” he says. “One thing’s for sure, though: You’re definitely never bored at LS Fest, there’s always something to do or check out. Track X was my favorite part of the competition – the layout allows for some speed and there’s a good flow to it, so it was easy for me to adapt my driving style to that.”

He adds that the seat time revealed new information about where the truck’s setup could be tweaked and his own technique further refined, and he continued to shave off time with each pass. More Goodguys and SCCA events are planned for the truck later this year, and Bishop says he may also bring it out for some Optima series events this fall. A few upgrades may in store for the C10 in the near future, too.

“I want to focus on some areas where I think there’s room for improvement in the truck so that, when I do get the opportunity to do an Optima event, I can just focus on driving rather than worrying about the aspects of the event where the truck might struggle. Right now I’m debating between swapping out the LS3 for an LS7 to get some more horsepower behind it, or if I should swap out the C6 transaxle for something else – whether that’s a sequential gearbox or TR6060 with the blocker rings and all that good stuff. There might be some differential upgrades as well. It kind of comes down to what makes the most sense for the events I want to do, and what makes sense from a financial perspective. And making the best choices isn’t always easy.”