The story of Chuck Tersolo’s Saturn is pure throw-back 1960’s stuff. It seems that the local karting facility was having a winter event that was sponsored by GM. All the employees of the local dealerships were mixing it up on the kart track and mingling off track. Chuck was a seasoned bracket racer (at the time behind the wheel of a V8-powered Chevette) so he was prepared for some wheel to wheel competition. He actually mopped up and won the event. Take that Saab guys!

Later, Chuck was throwing back a couple of cold ones with a group of participants when a well lubricated dealership manager asked, "How much to build me a race car?" Tersolo thought about it and threw out a number. In Chuck’s own words, "Not more than a week later he throws me the keys to a 1998 Saturn SC2." Chuck said that the manager had a plan on how to fund the operation, as he explained. "The dealership was using some of the advertising money on the car," he said. How novel, a race program to promote a car dealership!

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This was a great arrangement for Tersolo. The car was located at the shop he worked at every day, Saturn of Lowell. He had full run of the shop to work on the car, he had help from the guys in the shop to put it together and he had funding from the dealership. Too good to be true, right? Exactly right, because about a year after construction began, a management shakeup at the dealership left Tersolo’s project quite literally out in the cold. "It really stunk," he said. "The new people told me to get the car out of the dealership. I thought that they would want to see something out of it because they had already invested some money in what we had done so far, but they just wanted me to get that thing out of there."

This was the winter of 2002, and the following spring the car was supposed to debut. Now with the shop space gone, the dealer money gone and the cold New England winter raging, Tersolo was left with a tough decision. Should he sell the rolling chassis that was already done or should he finish the project out of his own pocket. "I really have to thank my wife for letting me finish the car at home on our own budget," he said. "It made things tough for a while, but I am really glad I decided to take the long way to get this done. A lot of people were telling me that I should pull a bunch of parts off of my old bracket car to get this done quicker, but I wanted it done right."

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When it left the dealership the chassis had been completed, using S&W components for the front end, back half, and cage. Chuck wanted to thank welder extraordinaire Chris Ryan for doing the final welding on those components (of course we could be really smart and ask why a guy has a welder at a Saturn dealer as the cars are made of some super secret polymer stuff). A tried and true 13.5:1, 383 Chevy with Brodix Track-1 heads, a big old solid roller cam bolted to a Turbo 350 have sent this car to 9.78 @ 139mph at New England Dragway. The car was supposed to run in 2002 but it finally began its competitive life in 2005. Good things take time, right?

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What really catches the eye with this car is the fact that the body is completely unaltered. "We looked at lot a Paul Rocco’s Top Sportsman Saturn and saw that the nose was stretched and some other portions of the body were changed," Tersolo said. "I really wanted to keep the stock lines, the stock panels and not change anything. We accomplished that and the car really looks great. It looks like the motor is set way back into the car but it is an illusion. The nose on a Saturn sticks out pretty far past the front tires, so it makes the motor seem like it is way back there but it really isn’t. The car was just scaled at Dan Page Race Cars and we had 54 percent on the front and 46 percent weight on the rear."

Chuck was keen to thank several people for making this happen. First off was Saturn of Lowell, the place where the project began. R&L engines of Dover, N.H., built the 383, Chris Ryan was the man responsible for welding the cage and other items on the car and Chuck was very sincere in his thanks and praise of his wife, who let him move his project home.