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One of the more neglected aspects of building a car – whether it’s for show or go – is the front drive system. We spend thousands on our cars, and put some of the best looking high performance parts on the engine, and then spend a coupe of hours rattle-canning the pulleys, brackets, and adjusters. It looks great on a complete stock engine or restoration, but when you’ve got custom valve covers, a new intake, headers, and all sorts of other look-fast goodies under the hood, those painted pulleys are mediocre, at best.
That’s where Concept One Pulley Systems came to be, it started with brothers Kevin and Randy Redd getting tired of searching for all the right pulleys and brackets for their builds. They decided to put their collective skills and education together to form Concept One front drive systems for popular V8 engines.
It's not unusual to find a factory supercharged powerplant under the hood of a classic car. Concept One has front drive kits for the factory superchargers and aftermarket, like the Edelbrock E-Force system (above).
Today, custom billet front drive systems are available for many popular Ford and Chevrolet engines in polished, satin, clear, and black finishes to match or complement your build. And when we started building with higher power potential, Concept One stepped up and provided kits for supercharged LS applications.
When those power levels started reaching even higher numbers, the Victory HD systems hit the streets with a wider, 8-rib belt and pulley system to give owners peace of mind that their front drive was up the kind a power these new builds were achieving. But then the brothers started thinking about what was really going on with all of these new builds, and they went back to the drawing board.
Remember when you thought a 100 amp alternator was a lot of power? Sometimes, that's not enough by today's standards, and Concept One has more than doubled that option.
Along with today’s builds, we’re seeing more than just horsepower numbers rise, and that’s when Kevin Redd filled us in on a few things. “People are adding more and more electrical components to their builds these days. They’re adding multiple cooling fans, EFI, air conditioning; we started to realize that we should bump the output of the Powermaster alternators in our systems,” he said.
It makes sense, and it’s a blessing. We’re constantly being told by companies like Powermaster that you should add up what your system is demanding, and get an alternator that can handle that type of load. We’re no longer in the days of five-fuse electrical systems with only a few accessories hanging on the ends of the wires.
People today are building their classic cars to not only perform like modern musclecars, but also to have similar luxuries that you’ll find in the latest models, too. High powered audio systems, auxiliary lighting, electric cooling fans, electric fuel pumps and EFI systems – all of these components add up to twice what your original alternator could handle.
Concept One recognizes that one of the more important aspects of a front drive system is to not only provide the components that are necessary, but to make sure that those components are up to par with the rest of your build, and that includes the alternator.
We felt that it’s important to provide our customers yet another option when they order a new front drive system, and we feel this is a step in the right direction, we had to do this. -Kevin Redd, Concept One
“We felt that it’s important to provide our customers yet another option when they order a new front drive system, and we feel this is a step in the right direction, we had to do this,” Redd explains. It makes sense to us, and it’s great that this is the direction they take, because it’s getting to that point where even a 120 amp alternator isn’t cutting it anymore.
Check out the Concept One Pulley System website and see what they’ve got for you classic musclecar. It doesn’t matter whether you keep it old school or bring it into the 21st century, Concept One will help add some cool bling to your front drive system so you can keep the rattle cans for your ‘other’ car.
