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"Turn back the clock to the IMSA GT series, and you&amp;#039;ll struggle to find much wrong with the legendary sports-car organization. It came to life in the 1970s when BMW, Jaguar, Porsche, and others dialed up the horsepower and intensified the styling on their production-based race cars to create cartoonish versions of what could be found on showroom floors. Production shells were strengthened by steel roll cages, and it wasn&amp;#039;t long before some of the GT cars looked more like a maze of welded tubing than anything that rolled off the assembly line.  Tires and rims grew wider, and fenders followed suit. Turbo engines glowed and spit flame; straight-pipe V8s deafened and inline-sixes spun to ridiculous redlines for the era. And somewhere in the middle of the exotica, the Chevy Monza, a misfit among American muscle cars (remember, this is the Mustang II era), found its home. The unheralded grocery-getters were transformed into championship-winning racers thanks to a collaboration between GM and Ohio&amp;#039;s DeKon Engineering. Al Holbert won back-to-back titles with the Monza in 1976-1977, using its tube-frame chassis, 350-cubic-inch small-block V8, and generally awesome fender flares to outpace the European machinery. Monza&amp;#039;s brief period atop IMSA GT was a shining moment for GM, but it didn&amp;#039;t do much for sales. The model was discontinued in 1980. The Monza pictured here now competes in vintage races across Europe, but sadly, it&amp;#039;s epic bicentennial-era stars-and-stripes No. 1 has been replaced with a far less patriotic set of numbers. Here it is in action:       "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a5068/motorsports-flashback-chevy-monza-imsa-gt-racer/>