This Was a Chevy Cobalt? This Savage Kit Car Came from An Unlikely Donor
We’ll admit we’re biased, but the great thing about drag-and-drive cars is the ability to do more than one thing with the same vehicle.
In some cases, participants at a drag-and-drive event have a ride that can also do more than just street driving and drag racing, and that’s the case with this 2020 DF Goblin kit car.
What is a Goblin you ask? It became Nathan Meske’s choice for a better car for his racing activities. “My main automotive activities are Autocross and High Performance Driving Events (HPDE),” said Nathan. “So, after struggling for years to get my Pontiac G8 to perform well, I decided I need something smaller and lighter.
There were quite a few candidates, but building and setting up a kit car sounded like a lot of fun, so I went that route.”
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The Goblin is a kit car available from CF Kit Car, with average builds weighing in between 1500 and 1600 pounds. “I ordered the Goblin at the end of March of 2020,” said Nathan. “The first week of June we flew down to Texas, bought a used truck, drove to DF headquarters to load up the kit, and then drove back home to Wisconsin.”
Less than two months later, Nathan had the frame was modified, powder coated, and fully assembled ready to drive!
The Goblin is designed to use a Chevrolet Cobalt drivetrain, but Nathan upped the ante a little. “I went with a 2006 Cobalt SS with the supercharged 2-liter engine and 5-speed manual trans,” said Nathan. “But then ended up swapping over to the later model Cobalt turbocharged setup to make more power.”
The engine is mostly stock, with only forged pistons and some valvetrain upgrades done.
So, with the Goblin built for autocross and HPDE, what brought Nathan to drag-and-drive events? “A whole week off work for racing and driving sounded awesome so I wanted to try it,” said Nathan. “Not only have I never done a drag-and-drive event before, I had never been down a drag strip before.
We intended to go do some test passes the weekend prior to Sick Summer just to make sure I knew what I was doing but the car wasn't done so the first pass was testing on Day 0.”
With Sick Summer Presented by TBM Brakes being Nathan’s first drag-and-drive outing, he admitted no idea what class it would be at home in, so he picked the Bullseye Challenge class.
Starting at Cordova Dragway with a 13.90 pass on day one, Nathan improved on his times at each track. When he returned to Cordova four days later, the Goblin clicked off a best-of-the-week pass of 12.26 at 108.76 mph.
“My only goal is/was to have fun,” said Nathan, who documented the experience on the WOT Club YouTube with his co-pilot, Anthony Cash. “My future goals would probably be trying to be a bit more competitive in whatever class we're running in.”
Written by Derek Putnam. Photos courtesy of Sick the Magazine and Nathan Meske.
If you have thoughts / feedback / ideas, please e-mail us at derek@sickthemagazine.com