The Rebellion Forge Racing E30
When this savage machine first entered Ross Gredys’ life almost a decade ago, it was a rust-free E30 with a blown head gasket intended to get him to work and back. Gredys turned his $900 investment into something priceless with build partner Kyle Ray.
After pulling the original M20 motor instead of repairing the blown head gasket, Gredys hit the forums and discovered how much aftermarket support the E30 enjoys. So, he made another investment: a used Honda Civic that would be his daily while he ripped apart the E30.
Over the course of nearly ten years, this E30 has been stripped down to bare metal and experimented on by Gredys and Ray, business partners in Rebellion Forge Racing. Gredys, by trade, is a skilled welder and fabricator. That sexy as hell but menacing exhaust—the centerpiece of this spectacular build—is a testament to his talents. He also grew up around hot rods: his grandfather judged the World of Wheels shows for around 30 years.
Ray, as evidenced by these pictures, is an accomplished automotive painter. He also counts bodywork and mechanical engineering as weapons in his automotive arsenal. To create the eye-catching color, he drizzled onto the RFR E30, he started with Porsche Olive Green added a touch of his own to create the final mix we can’t stop starring at.
Every seam on the E30 has been stitch welded. Inspired by motorsports, the front and rear of the chassis were cut off and replaced with tubular steel. Suspension components were fabricated in-house, including tubular rear control arms and machined parts upfront. Gredys made his first roll cage and installed it in this car. In fact, Gredys says that this car was always meant to be a dedicated track weapon, and may still become one in the future. When asked to describe this 500HP Club member’s road manners, Gredys says it’s violent.
“It’s a very visceral, very raw car,” he says. “Everything that’s been done to that chassis is race car. When you get in it you feel everything, you hear everything... It’s just—it’s very violent.”
Before ever receiving the invite to show the E30 at SEMA, Gredys had decided it was time to finish the E30...as much as any project car is really ever “finished.” After eight or nine years using it as a testbed to figure things out before working on other client cars, the E30 looked worse for wear. But it obviously had the potential to become a masterpiece and calling card.
“It was kind of ugly because it was beat up, and there were a lot of mismatched parts, but I’m like, ‘We really have something here,’” says Gredys. “It was kind of like that perfect storm where it was in a spot where Kyle—my business partner,—and I had kind of already made the conscious decision like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna finish this car.”
Call it chance, divine intervention, destiny, fate or good fortune, but in 2018 the perfect storm Gredys and Ray found themselves in took an intriguing turn: Khyzyl Saleem and Eric Penelow dropped the Live To Offend body kit you see adorning the RFR E30. Gredys reached out the day he saw the kit, RFR and LTO started corresponding regularly, and Gredys’ exhaust work impressed Saleem and Penelow.
The E30 then caught another set of incredibly influential eyes: Meguiar’s. They wanted the car at their SEMA 2019 booth. When Gredys received that call, he thought, “There no frickin’ way.” During his talks with LTO about bringing the RFR E30 to SEMA, Gredys assumed that the car would be displayed somewhere outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. But then Mike Pennington from Meguiar’s called and invited RFR to bring their E30 to the Central Hall booth. Gredys and Ray were excited but now the situation was very real and the pressure was on. After all, the E30’s boothmate would be a car brought in from New Zealand that he estimates to be a million-dollar build.
“We already thought the bar was high—we just kinda launched it into outer space,” says Gredys of the Meguiar’s invitation.
Once again, the E30 was stripped down to bare metal, this time for sandblasting. Over four-and-a-half months, it was carefully reassembled with great attention to detail. Gredys and Ray had been experimenting with the car for close to ten years: everything they had learned and perfected came into play to make it SEMA-worthy.
Due to time constraints, Gredys and Ray chose to outsource the engine, to a point. The duo had machined several parts and collected others over the course of a few years but the clock had been working against them. The ferocious heart of this monster, a six-liter aluminum short block LS3 with Texas Speed Stage 3 cam, was assembled by high-horsepower application specialist Nick Smithberg and Sid Anderson of Smithberg Racing in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. Smithberg built LS6 cathedral port heads to pair with the LS3.
Ultimately, the RFR E30 would finish top three among the Battle of the Builders Young Guns at SEMA 2019. Gredys largely credits his business partner Ray for the achievement. Working long hours at his fabrication and building business meant that Gredys relied heavily on Ray to complete the build in time for SEMA.
“He was the guy that was putting in a lot more hours as far as making sure that everything was getting done and put together,” says Gredys. “He did all the bodywork on the car. He was the one that painted the car. He’s a very, very talented individual.”
Those who have seen the car in person can attest to the staggering amount of details vying for attention. There’s the custom, in-house fabricated exhaust system, of course. The attention-pulling customized Porsche Olive Green paint. The extreme LTO widebody kit. But there’s one detail—perhaps “detail within a detail” is more accurate—in the interior of which Gredys and Ray are particularly proud.
The shifter bezel was fabricated in-house, designed to encompass a brake bias switch for easy access. But it also houses a slot for a Haltech USB for engine management. And without that USB stick in place, the E30 won’t start—the key for the ignition is one-off brilliance. Why did they do this? Because Ray thought it would be cool if their key was the Haltech USB stick. He was right.
