When Rob Golobo hoisted the Heavy Street trophy high over his head in front of the famous "Speed World" wall at the conclusion of this year’s Orlando World Street Nationals, he was swept by a number of strong emotions.

He was ecstatic about claiming one of the hardest-earned titles in fast street car drag racing, of course, having outlasted five tough opponents to make it to the winners circle. He was also proud to have his friends and family around to share in his moment of triumph. But perhaps the strongest emotion the 29 year-old man from Michigan felt was the undeniable sense that a good friend had been with him all the way on that long, hot weekend if Florida. Riding with him and urging him on to accomplish the feat that he too desired for so long.

That friend was Steve Grebeck, the man who built Rob’s beautiful 2002 Camaro, and the man who died at this very racetrack in March of 2002 at the age of 36 doing the thing he loved best – running all-out towards the finish line.

This is the story of how Rob Golobo got started in the sport of drag racing, and how Steve Grebeck became such an integral part of his competitive life.

Today, Golobo owns and operates Atlas Paving in White Lake, Michigan, where he lives with wife Nichole and twin five-year-olds, Rob Jr. and Lexie.

Like so many of the current generation of drag racers, Rob came by his love of fast cars and competition at his father’s knee. "I got into the drag racing game like so many other people – my dad ran a 12-second car for years when I was a kid, and I just grew into it naturally. It was nothing real serious – mainly just weekend bracket racing at Milan Dragway, but I really loved it, and once you get involved it’s just about impossible to get out.

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"The first car I remember him driving was a ’57 Chevy, but in the early 80s he bought a cherry ’69 Camaro show car at a Super Chevy Show, and a little later he started racing it," Rob added. "The funny thing about that was that he didn’t like to drive the car on the street - he hated going over railroad tracks with it, so we trailered it to the track every weekend just so he could make 11-second passes on radial tires at the dragstrip!"

When the time came, Rob naturally wanted to have his own hot rod, but his choice was something a little out of the ordinary. "My first racing vehicle was actually a 1990 Chevy pick-up truck," he said. "The first time I took it down the track it ran in the 16s, and two months later it was in the 12s. A little while later I put in a roll cage and mini-tubs so I could run a 10-inch tire and that became the first vehicle I did any serious racing with. By the time I got rid of it two years ago it had a 530 cubic-inch big block with one stage of nitrous under the hood, and ran 9.20s."

We were getting ahead of the story at that point, however, and Rob back-tracked to put his story in proper chronological order. "I still had the truck when I bought a brand-new 1992 Camaro and drove it straight from the dealership to the track in Milan. It had 83 miles on it when I made the first pass down the strip, and the car went 14.80, right out of the box. I bracket raced that car for quite a while and eventually replaced the stock 305 Tuned Port engine with a 383 stroker motor that got it down into the elevens. I ended up tubbing the car with the goal of dipping into the nines, and did manage to go 9.90 with the small block under the hood."

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With Golobo now venturing into some serious drag racing territory, he knew it was time to enlist the aid on an expert, and that’s when his life, both on and off the track, was permanently altered, as he explained. "It was around this time that I first met Steve Grebeck," he said. "When we had the car tubbed, it just had a two by three ladder bar set-up, which was fine for cruising on the street, but when we tried to race the car that way, we ran into problems. The car had 16-33s under it at the time, but it just looked goofy with 10-inch tires on it no matter how much wheel offset you had. We ended up making up some 6-inch aluminum spacers so we could bolt the 10-inch rubber on the car.

"We ran it that way at a Super Street deal, and it worked out pretty well, so we decided to go ahead and have a narrow rear-end housing made and move up to a four-link suspension," Golobo said. "That’s when I got in touch with Steve, and the first thing he wanted to do was rip the whole car apart – he really didn’t want anything to do with it the way it was, to tell you the truth. The car sat in his shop for over five months because he just didn’t want to work on it. He insisted that the entire suspension needed to be redone, but all I wanted was a new housing and a four-link.

"One of the big problems we had was that the tin work all had to be redone to make room for the upper four-link bars. After a lot of discussions, Steve finally decided to do the work for me, but said it would take a couple of months, so we took the Dana 60 housing out of the car and put it in my truck, which then let us run ten-inch tires on it so we could keep racing while the Camaro was being modified."

The work was eventually completed, and Rob knew the first time out that he had gone to the right man. "Steve eventually fabricated a nine-inch rear-end for us and installed the four-link set-up, and the first time we took the car out it ran an 8.20! That made it one of the top three fastest Super Street cars in existence at the time," Rob recalled. "The car was powered by a 509-inch big block, and we ran it that way for a while. Later, we made a lot of other changes, eventually going back to a smaller 420-inch Big Chief engine so we wouldn’t have to weigh as much and running it that way for a while longer in Super Street. That car was raced pretty hard, and it had over 14,000 miles on it when I finally sold it, most of it put on a quarter of a mile at a time.

"Like I said, the car really ran pretty well, but the first time Steve ever looked at it he said that I needed to have him build me something new, from the ground up," Golobo continued. So while I was racing the ’92 in Super Street, plans were made to go ahead and build a new Camaro for the Nostalgia Pro Street class. I found a clean V6 ’94 model at a dealership in Kalamazoo, bought it for $3,400 and drove it to Steve’s shop so it could be cut up and made into a race car. I actually sold $2,000 worth of parts off the car, so it turned out to be a pretty cheap starting point."

Ask anyone who ever worked with him, and they’ll tell you that Grebeck was as much a teacher and mentor as a chassis builder, something that Rob really appreciated. "Steve actually let me get involved with a lot of the fabrication work, which was something I really wanted to do, because I wanted to learn from the experience rather than just go pick the car up when it was finished."

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Due to Rob’s cash flow situation at certain times of the year, the new Camaro project was done a bit at a time, moving ahead when he could afford to have the next stage or stages completed. "Steve could have likely had the car done in five or six months normally," he said, "but it stopped and started as I paid him a little at a time.

Unfortunately, Grebeck never got to finish Golobo’s car, as he was tragically killed in early 2002, as mentioned. At the time of Steve’s untimely death, Rob’s car was just about to the roller stage, with just some tubing, which had already been cut and fitted, needing to be welded in. Determined to see the project through to completion, Grebeck’s guys Billy Gilsbach and Bret Templeton later stepped up and finished the car for Rob.

With all the work done and stunning orange and black paint work applied, Rob and his crew took the car to Norwalk raceway Park in Ohio and made their first test pass in March of 2003. "We never even made a motor pass or anything - we sprayed the thing right out of the box and let it fly. I shut it down at 330 feet and we had run 3.23, which was a tenth faster than we’d ever run in the other car, so we knew we had something good on our hands. We had hoped to make a few more passes, but there was some confusion over the track rental situation in Norwalk, so we headed straight to Belle Rose, Louisiana for the NSCA season opener."

Proving just what an awesome car he now had under him, Golobo proceeded to qualify in the top position at belle Rose and go on to win the race. In fact, he qualified first at every NSCA event in 2003, and won his first championship going away in an unbelievable undefeated season. "We made 78 passes in NSCA with the car in ’03, and we were never beaten to the finish line, not even during qualifying," Rod said. "I don’t ever waste a chance to try and cut a good light, even during qualifying. We were never behind anyone on the track at all that year. A lot of people say they don’t bother trying to cut a light, but to me it’s just normal to react every time I’m at the line."

It’s one thing to cut good lights, and it’s another to have a solid, well-behaved race car at your command in order to take advantage of the situation. One vital, and very enviable fact regarding Rob’s Grebeck Racecraft-built hot rod is that in two years of tough competition it has never had a chassis adjustment - ever. In fact, after just one out of shape attempt on his very first shot at the No Problem Raceway Park quarter-mile in early 2003, the car has never offered to shake, slide or wiggle any time since. Rob’s next pass that day in Louisiana yielded a mark of 7.56 at 188 and he’s never looked back.

But back to the 2004 season. In spite of Rob’s stellar rookie season, his defense of the title in 2004 got off to a rocky start as parts required to freshen the Camaro’s engine didn’t arrive until the Tuesday following the season opener in Louisiana, forcing the team to miss the all-important event. Unfortunately, this what-a-difference-a-week-makes scenario was all it took to spoil Golobo’s bid for back-to-back championships. Despite earning more points than eventual winner John Schroeder did at the races the two competed at, the loss of the first event’s points relegated the Golobo team to the runner-up position after the Corteco NSCA World Finals in September.

Speaking of the Camaro’s engine, Rob gave a few details, saying "we run a Mike Moran 632 in the car, which has old-style 18-degree rectangular port heads and a single stage of nitrous, which is all we’re allowed in Nostalgia Pro Street. Mike always finds the way to make power with it, but he’d really like to build us a piece with some of the latest high-tech parts. It’s all a matter of money, of course, and we’re doing all right with the stuff we have, so we’re going to stick with it for now. I have had some thoughts about selling the motor and the spare we have and trying something else, but that’s sometime we’ll look at on down the road.

"Overall, we had a better engine program in 2004 than we did the year before," Rob explained. "We had no major maintenance issues at all, never hurt anything, and only freshened the engine one time all year. In 2003 we kept taking out bearings because we had a problem with the oil pump, but this year we added another section to the oiling system and that took care of everything. Ironically, fixing that situation was what caused us to miss the first race of the year because we had to get the block welded, get the registers cut down and have it line-honed to make everything 100% again.

"We had plenty of power this year, though," Golobo added. "The NSCA added 75 pounds to us for 2004 and we still ran just about as well as we did at the lighter weight. We had to make a lot of changes and do a lot of testing to compensate for the extra weight, though – it’s not an easy thing to do."

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The Camaro also has a Rossler 400 transmission slung underneath, and the nine-inch rear-end houses Precision 4:30 gears. With all this equipment working in perfect harmony, Rob has run a best of 7.509 at 190.71, just a tick above the Nostalgia Pro Street limit of 7.50. "When people read that we’re running 4:30 gears they might figure out what we’re doing to get a big mile an hour," Rob said with a laugh. "Most everyone I know runs 4:56 or higher. We tried the 4:56 and could only get the car to run 176 miles an hour, so that why we run the 4:30.

So with a championship and a runner-up in Nostalgia Pro Street under his belt in just two years in the class, Golobo’s stature in the sport of "street-legal" drag racing is growing rapidly, and his prestigious victory in Orlando just adds to his reputation as a tough guy to beat.

Looking back at the experience, Rob said "the win in Orlando was great, and it was definitely for Steve. I thought about him a lot all weekend, because he lost his life at the track in Orlando, and it’s been real tough for me to go there and race since then. I think he would have been real proud of us and the car he built because he always wanted to win that race, and I’m not really sure if he ever did. I do know that when I went down there with him when he debuted the Mustang he built for Greg Belvins, he was real proud of the photos taken in front of the Speed World wall. I really wanted to have my photo taken there myself some day to honor Steve’s memory, and I was finally able to do that.

As all racers know, they’re only as good as their team and the people who support them, so Rob was quick to recognize the efforts of "Dirt Ball" Dougie, Billy Gilsbach, Bret Templeton, Baldy (Matt), and his wife Nichole. He also extended has thanks to Mike Moran, Mike "Sparky" Brown, NOS, Torco Race Fuels, Anthony Jones, Hoosier Tires, Moroso, Dart Machinery and Hardcore Motorsports. Golobo also wanted to mention that the two guys who completed the fabrication of his car, Gilsbach and Templeton, are each running their own businesses now. Gilsbach has Altered Customs in Westland, Michigan and Templeton has Slickcraft in Lapiere, Michigan, and according to Rob, "they’re both doing some really good work."

Also in the realm of the importance of support, it’s a little known fact from Orlando that one of the owners of Hardcore Motorsports, Ronnie Duke, really helped Rob achieve his goal on Sunday. The transmission in his car broke during the final qualifying session on Saturday, and Duke, who didn’t make the Radial Tire show, generously offered Rob the use of the transmission out of his own car. Fortunately, it was a nearly-identical Rossler piece, and bolted right in. Rob went on to take out five determined Heavy Street competitors during the elimination rounds, and finally got to stand in front of the famous wall for the photographers.

You’ll remember that earlier in this story Rob mentioned some thoughts he was having for his future in drag racing, and here he elaborates on those plans. "We’re thinking of having Mike Moran build us a turbocharged small block engine and doing some 10.5 racing with the Camaro," Golobo explained. "In fact, we’re already looking at what parts we’ll need to order to get things rolling. It’ll take some time to get the program off the ground, but if I can sell one of my 632s, then I would have enough money to build the small block. That way we figure we could run in Super Street in the NSCA and also get involved with the 10.5 stuff down south, which is really going strong."

In conclusion, Golobo added, "that’s what we really want to do – not that there’s anything wrong with Nostalgia Pro Street, but there are fewer and fewer cars out there, and to tell the truth, we’re looking for some more competition. Having to qualify against so many tough cars in Orlando and then go five rounds to win the title really fired us up. You really have to work hard and be on your game all the time at a race like that, and that’s the kind of thing we’re looking for."