Event Coverage from LS Fest East 2022

If your thing is sitting behind your car in a lawn chair, there’s a place for that. And Beech Bend is a beautifully green and shady park that makes hanging out quietly in the car show area very pleasant. But the rest of the place is in constant motion. The dragstrip and fenced in corral for autocross, the burnout contest, and drifting are within 30 feet of each other. Plus, the cars angrily loping to and from those events make for a moveable feast of LS-swapped everything. As a spectator, you can find a good vantage point and let the show come to you.

The dragstrip at LS Fest is active all day and into the night. This year, some drizzle on Saturday and all-out rain on Sunday put a damper on the action, but we still got to see a few passes by everything from an LS-swapped mail Jeep (not to mention a Willys Jeep) to a full-tilt dragster.

Our own Team Speedway had a couple cars doing battle in the Grand Champion competition. This is a grueling contest meant to reward the best all-around car and driver. You can’t just be good at one thing to win this. Instead, your car has to tackle the dragstrip, 3S competition, and the twisties on not one but two autocross courses, one at Beech Bend and the other across town at the National Corvette Museum. The NCM course is a much bigger and faster course than Beech Bend has room for. Not to mention that most drivers elect to actually drive these monsters on the street to and from NCM. This makes for some amusing sightings of rowdy late model Corvettes with enormous wings and slammed muscle cars with rumpety-rump idles puttering along in traffic amongst the late model ignoremobiles.

One of the things that has made the “LS swap the world” movement possible is the fact that these engines are just compact enough to fit into about anything. Like the Gen I and II small block Chevys before them, these engines are turning up under (and poking through) the hoods of everything from the aforementioned mail Jeep to Rolls Royces (we’re not kidding, and we have pictures to prove it). That makes for an interesting show because anything goes. Mustangs? Check. Dodge Darts and Coronets? Check check. Nissan Maximas? Yep. We love the irreverence and our cameras found a few of the more improbable combos for your viewing pleasure.

There are lots of really nice cars at LS Fest. Perfect paint, perfect stance, fully finished interior. But there are also plenty that are still in progress. These folks aren’t waiting for it to be perfect to take it out and have some fun with, and we fully support that. Here are a few that were not quite finished, but cool nonetheless. Some of these were fired for the first time days (or hours) before the show.