When joining the Pontiac GTO owners’ club, you learn a lot of things. First and foremost, your car is an Australian Holden Monaro; don’t forget it. Everyone has some sort of knowledge related to the history of your vehicle; including where it came from and they want to tell you the story over and over again. If you’re going to buy one, you might as well get used to it. Another thing you’ll learn is that the nameplate can be swapped out with a variety of other titles.
Some of them include “Cavalier SS,” “Widebody Grand Am,” and our personal favorite: “Sunfire WS6.” While it can be entertaining to poke fun at the rebadged Aussie car, we also have a great deal of respect for it. Your author even owns one, as can be seen in the video above.
If you are familiar with LS2s, you know that one of the most common things to fail on them is the lifters. When this goat started making a wicked squealing noise, all signs pointed to just that.
In the video you’ll see the entire process as me and a couple of buddies remove the original LS2 lifers, and replace them with more robust LS7 lifters. While the top end was apart, the heads were also spruced up a bit as well to compliment the shiny new lifters, and topping it all off was a port job on the intake to free up a few extra ponies. As you can see in the 2-minute time lapse, things came together quite nicely.