I’m writing this from the driver seat of
the ’66 Chevelle you see here. There’s no better place from which to share the
story. I’ve spent the last 25 years driving this car to school and work, racing
it regularly, and making change after change to it. This car has been with me
through some of my best points in life and some of my worst.
This story really begins in 1986 in Las
Cruces, New Mexico. A guy named Mike L. owned the Chevelle, and he was trying
to build a decent driver out of it. He had rescued it from a previous owner,
who threatened to turn it into a dirt-track racer if Mike didn’t buy it. Mike
and I met through street racing and mutual friends, and I helped him work on
the car when I could. After swapping in several used automatic transmissions, a
couple of small-block engineers, and adding gallons of body filler and primer,
the car started to take on a desirable shape.
Here’s
the same car that’s seen in the previous spread, finished in early 2012. The
car severed its street-racing roots and took on a Pro Touring style with a nod
to the past and to the simplicity of an early A-body with a stick and V8 and
little else.
A quick over-correction on a dirt road
brought that progress to a halt, the passenger-side quarter-panel connected
with a concrete barrier, ripping and crushing the sheet metal as well as Mike’s
ambition to continue working on the car. In the weeks that followed, he found
another Chevelle frame with an empty body and planned to transfer parts from
the old car. This was shortly after HOT ROD had done the original “Caddy Hack”
story (Feb. ’87), inspiring us to make one last trip to the street drags as we
were stripping the Chevelle. We ditched anything not absolutely necessary for
forward acceleration. We removed so much weight that traction was an issue, so
we strapped a 350 engine block to the trunk latch support. Based on comparison
with our usual competitors, we picked up more than a second in the
quarter-mile!
After that, Mike removed the last parts and
was going to send what was left of the old Chevelle to the salvage yard. I
convinced him to give it to me instead, cementing my passion for Chevelles. My
parents weren’t sure what to say when the backyard was filled with this hulk
consisting of little more than frame rails, a roof, floor, and quarter-panels.
I found two parts cars and began swapping the best pieces onto mine.
One of the parts cars was a four-door and
the other was a 300 model, which made for an interesting collection of parts. I
used plenty of body filler and fiberglass screen to fill the gash in the
quarter-panel. I did my best to smooth the rest of the electric collection of
sheet metal and shot the whole thing in primer gray. I built a 327 with a lumpy
cam and an Edelbrock Scorpion single-plane intake. I scrounged up a Saginaw
four-speed and an open 3.08-geared 10-bolt. It wasn’t particularly nice, but it
was a more-or-less complete car, and it was drivable.
I pursued quicker quarter-mile times with
practically no budget, which led me to install 4.88 gears and weld up the stock
differential. I also hung a set of ladder bars. The car was definitely quicker,
but part of the joy of driving it was gone, too – my first lesson in
undesirable compromises.
In 1990, I got the opportunity of a
lifetime: a job offer at HOT ROD magazine. In short order, I needed to pack up
my life and move to Los Angeles. My brother, Kyle, did a quick paintjob to make
the Chevelle more presentable. I cut the ladder-bar mounts off the frame and
swapped in a 3.08-geared 10-bolt axle to make the 800-mile trek to my new
career. Over the next 12 years, I drove my Chevelle to work on the crowed LA
freeways and raced it at Los Angeles Country Raceway. I installed two engines
and blew up two four-speed transmissions. The same 10-bolt lived until I took
the car apart most recently for a complete rebuild.
This Chevelle was my mechanical best
friend. Always there for me, always ready to go for a drive, whether to work or
play or for a cross-country adventure.
Even
20 years ago, I loved road trips in hot rods. Nutt, New Mexico, was the gateway
to a rural highway littered with ghost towns I’d escape to a few times a year.
When
I moved to Michigan, my Chevelle and all of my other toys were tucked away in
storage until I had time to work on them again. For my Chevelle, that came in
2010, when I started on the next phase of the car.
I
think engine was in the car longer than any other. It was essentially a ZZ4
crate motor, though I shaved the desk for compression and swapped in a
hydraulic roller cam that was more to my liking. It made 410 hp and 400 lb-ft
of torque. It was a lot nicer working on my car on my garage in Michigan than
it was in my parents’ dirt driveway in New Mexico!
Since
I knew this car so well and had applied most of the body filler personally,
there were only a few surprises when the guys at Strip-It-All took it down to
bare metal. I hung up the chunk of fiberglass screen, rust, and body filler
from the passenger quarter-panel in my shop as a memento.
