Working in the restaurant business is definitely challenging – the long hours, hot kitchen temperatures, unruly guests, and a generally stressful atmosphere can turn away many aspiring chefs and servers after a short career working at the local fish fry. We can only imagine how much more difficult it becomes for a guy like New York’s Stefan Destito, who works as a Regional Chef for one of the most awesome restaurant chains around, The Cheesecake Factory. As the Regional Chef, he’s in charge of kitchen operations for all of the restaurants in his region – everything from recipes to food quality to hiring is under his umbrella, and he oversees ten executive chefs at ten different Cheesecake Factory locations within his coverage area.

That prestige comes with tradeoffs. “In the summertime we’re pretty busy, so a lot of the time when everyone’s racing I’m busy working,” he says. And since Stefan’s also got a young family that’s important to him, time to go racing is even more limited. His wife, Maribel, five year 0ld daughter Evangeline, and two-and-a-half year old son, Brendan, all help keep him on his toes when he’s not working. 

After further investigation, it turns out that his obsession with food actually took him to the place where he met his friend/engine builder, one Tyree Smith of Ty Tech Performance in Lewisburg, Tennessee. But it wasn’t in Tennessee – it was actually in Miami, a number of years ago when Destito was still in school.

“I had a friend from here at home who recommended that I go see Ty when I was still in culinary school. I was living near Miami and he was down there building engines. It ended up that we lived near each other, and we just ended up being real good friends and even did some street racing together back then. When I moved out of Florida, I went back to New York and a month after that he moved to Tennessee. Ty built my first engine when this car was still a street car. For me, it’s worth the ride to go to Tennessee to have him work on my stuff, because he always has my best interests in mind. The first time he built an engine for me I told him I was looking for 11.0’s, and the car ended up running a 9.90 its first time out and eventually went 9.40,” Destito explained.

As the LT1 doesn’t have the same reputation for making huge horsepower in a high-performance environment, we were surprised to hear that’s what was under the hood of this gorgeous 1993 Pontiac Trans Am, rather than the traditional small-block Chevy or late-model LS architecture. Stefan is out to see just what this combination can do, and as many projects do, it snowballed from a single purchase and wasn’t begun as an actual X275 build.

“At the time I had bought a set of the AFR raised-runner heads, and then my wife got pregnant, we had the baby, and I was just itching to go racing but had to put everything on hold at that point. I had the heads, I had the intake, I had a good bottom end, but everything was in pieces. Once I told Ty it was full steam ahead, he had the engine together in a couple of months, and then it just kind of turned into a little more here and a little more there.

“We decided to put a supercharger on it, sent the car down to Jason Gatlin at ATF for the blower bracketry, and once I saw how good that looked, I told Ty to go all-out on the car. Steve Matukas built the 25.2 chassis originally, then Tyree did some modifications to the car along with doing the wiring and the plumbing and everything else,” he said.

Tyree put together a 400 cubic inch LT1 combination that relies on a Callies billet crankshaft, Oliver billet connecting rods, a set of custom Ross pistons, and a Ty Tech custom camshaft. It’s topped off with a set of Air Flow Research 215RR cylinder heads and a Tyree-ported Edelbrock Victor manifold. Weldon and MSD provide the fuel and fire, a Big Stuff 3 from Joe Oplawski at Hyperaktive Performance Solutions provides the engine control, while boost is pushed from one of ProCharger’s F-1R reverse-rotation superchargers.

Marty Gundt at Ty Tech built Stefan a sweet set of custom fenderwell-exit headers, and the power goes through a PTC torque converter and ATF Speed Powerglide on its way to the Strange Engineering 9-inch housing. Strange axles and spool fill the housing, and 4.11:1 gears help to turn the axle-twisting torque into forward (and sometimes upward) motion. PA Racing provided the front K-member and control arms, and Tyree is currently changing the front struts to Santhuff double-adjustables along with dropping the factory glass out of the car for weight savings. A Madman torque arm, lower control arms, and panhard rod help to control the rearend’s motion, and a set of sweet Weld Racing wheels are on the corners. 

His career keeps him busy, despite the best efforts to plan on some racing fun.

“Last year I was only able to get the car out three times – once to Holly Springs in April, once to Georgia in July, and to the Shakedown. Every time I was supposed to go test last year I just couldn’t get the time away from work. This year the goal is to get out at least once a month, whether it’s to race or to test or whatever. The car’s had a problem with wheelstanding real bad every time we’ve had it out so far. Ty completed the car probably a year and a half ago, but I just haven’t been able to get out a lot. We figured out that we had some issues with the suspension, which Ty went and fixed, and then we got back out to test it again. We’ve just been trying to get the car to work each time we’ve been out so far, and Ty really hasn’t even done anything in the Big Stuff 3 yet,” explained Stefan. 

The car has shown lots of promise when he’s been able to get to the track with it. “So far the car has been 5.07 at only 140 MPH. Ty feels that the car is four-second capable, and we want to see if I can do that with the stock-block LT1 engine that’s in the car,” he says.

Although the plan is to work with the stock-block LT1 as long as it responds, he also has Ty Tech working on a 390 cube traditional SBC that’ll use a set of AFR 245 cylinder heads with an Edelbrock Victor and the same F-1R ProCharger that’s on the car currently. With the new engine and F-1R, Stefan thinks that 4.70’s are going to be possible for the team for later in the season. Right now, the plan is to attend Holly Springs in April, the Holcomb Civil Wars event, and some of the other local races on the East Coast during the 2013 season. We look forward to seeing him back in competition with this beautiful machine.