Automotive Scene: We Went To Prefix Cars & Coffee:
Vipers, Minotaurs and HEMIs... Oh My!
Saturday, we had a chance to attend Prefix Corporation’s Cars & Coffee event at their facility in Auburn Hills, Michigan. We’ve explained before how Prefix Corporation began in 1979 as an engineering services company, developing innovative design and engineering solutions for the automotive industry. Continuously owned and operated by the same founding family, today the company operates multiple facilities in Michigan with over 200 employees, and has become a single-source American manufacturing, prototype, and concept vehicle solutions provider to automotive, aviation, motion picture, amusement, and a variety of additional industries.
The company has a large connection to the Mopar community. In the past, the company painted all of the body panels for the GEN V Viper (2013 to 2017), bought the Viper performance company known as Arrow Racing Engines, built concepts for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) like the 2017 Chrysler Portal Concept and created a whole line of speciality aftermarket FCA vehicles including the Ram Minotaur offroad pickup, Viper Madusa Roadster, and Viper Targa model.
Prefix was nice enough to give us a partial tour of their coatings and engine building facility. We say partial because there were some areas off-limits due to development of concept vehicles for customers. However, Prefix is still largely involved in the world of Mopar.
Every month, Prefix Performance builds two to three performance Viper V-10 engines for customers.. The company holds more in-stock inventory for Viper engines, than anywhere else in the world. But Viper engines are just a small portion of their performance engine business. Prefix Performance now builds performance kits for HEMI V-8 engines as well. The same facility builds racing engines for three-quarters of the SCCA Trans-Am racing teams, which includes GM, Ford and Chrysler engines for the series. Prefix also sponsors Stevens Miller Racing Dodge Challengers in the Trans-Am series.
Prefix still does a lot of restoration, repair, custom builds and custom painting for customers as well. We got to see a small area of the shop, where such customer builds were going on. While many of the cars were Vipers from across the country and different parts of the world, there were some Ram SRT-10 performance trucks, a custom Jeep J-20 full-size pickup, some old Mopar muscle cars, someone’s personal Ram 1500 being converted into a Minotaur and even a few European brand cars being worked on.
We were given a tour of their chassis dyno, in which Prefix hooked up a customer’s personal 2006 Dodge Viper Competition Coupe race car. The car was sent to the company to get an engine upgrade, put the car on the dyno to get some data of the current setup before they started working on a new setup.
Prefix didn’t just provide donuts and coffee either, they also handed out some really neat looking trophy’s in the forms of pistons to their five top-picks of the event.
The next event is October 27th. If you are in the Metro Detroit area, we recommend you stop by their facility to check out the show and take a tour of their shop. It’s a must do for any diehard Mopar fan.
Prefix Cars & Coffee Gallery – September 2018:
