performance with a winning edge

 David Cospelich, born in 1965, was introduced to the racing industry at an early age. In 1972 his Father, Fred AKA "Monkey", built, owned, and operated an NHRA drag strip, Deep South Dragway. This state-of-the-art facility, for the time, was Division Four Buster’s Rebels. After having to sell the race track, in 1975, his father opened a small fabrication shop that specialized in structural steel  and residential wrought iron. David worked in the family business throughout Jr high school and was began building his own hot rods at night after regular hours.1980 he used his experience and knowledge of fabrication with his passion for racing and started building his own race cars and soon was competing on the very track his family built which is now Gulfport Dragway.  

    Racing was spread throughout his family. In the 1950s, his Uncle Joe Caspolich was credited with many features wins as a circle track driver. After being convinced to step up to NASCAR , Joe found immediate success at his first entry in the Darlington Southern 500 and in 1959, was inducted into the NASCAR Pure Darlington Record club as the fastest Oldsmobile. He was one of eight members, including Richard Petty, Fireball Roberts, Elmo Langley Marvin Panch, among others. Even David's mother, Barbara, owned a stock car in the late 70s that ran on the local dirt tracks in south Mississippi.

    With NHRA drag racing and short track stock cars in his blood, David focused on chassis building as his passion over driving. ” I loved driving, but eight seconds didn’t last long enough; race car construction was something that took time and could last forever”. In 1982 David formed Steel Brothers Race Cars with his father and younger brother Jason Cospelich. The business took off and Soon Steel Bros Race Cars was building NHRA Pro Stock cars, Super Gas, Super Stock, Super Comp, Pro Street, and Late Model Dirt cars, and in the mid 80"s this was the The Place to take  "Anything Fast"  in the southeast. Soon they were building Sprint Cars , asphalt cars and were credited with building a D gas roadster that set a land speed record of 210 MPH on the Utah salt flat in 1988 by Paul Vanderly of Biloxi Mississippi. With over 300 wins in a variety of racing forms he was able to hit the road racing for a living consulting racing teams all over the nation.

   In 2005 after Katrina destroyed the shop and his hometown of Gulfport, MS, he returned to help out family and friends and was determined to stay a while. He was ask to participate in the annual event “Cruisin’ The Coast” which leads thousands of people and their pro street rods and antique vehicles to the Golden Gulf Coast of Mexico, and this inspired him to resume his love of building fast cars, this event uses the very streets that he raced on as a teenager. In 2008 he expanded the business model with over 28 vendors to make  Savage Performance a leader that is able to oversee any custom project in the high performance industry, which specializes in complete cars, custom fabrication, parts, suspension tuning and accessories. Savage  is currently building a new 8500 SF facility that will be a few miles from Hwy 90 which is the main drag for the 3rd largest car cruise in the USA, with thousand's of entries and visitors for Cruisin' The Coast.