This 1955 Chevy, affectionately named "Bad Jose," was included in Popular Hot Rodding sampling of 10 different ways to build Tri-Fives. In January 1970, the editorial argued that there was no better time to bring this machine to your attentio... <BR><BR>To read the rest of this blog entry from The Jalopy Journal, click here.
That article brings back memorys. I was privileged, yes privileged I say, to have worked for Jerry back in that 70-72 time frame. That car was sure a beauty as was his 57 Corvette and his 63 Corvette. Don't have a picture of the 57, but here is the 63.
I always liked their parts and looked forward to their eye candy adverti*****ts back when I was in high school.
Wish there were more pics of the engine as I am building an injected 327 to go into my '55 g***er. Would like to see if it uses a Gilmore drive to allow use of a stock water pump. Do you have any recollection of this John Brown?
No recollections. I have only seen the pictures that were posted in the article above that were in old magazines, except for that one picture of the 63 Vette at the Suffolk Va. drag strip which I found on line. No one I have talked to [once in a while I run into one of Jerrys old customers] has any pictures from back then. We were only into racing. Most of us never collected pictures. Hell, the only pictures I have of my old cars were ones I found in my parents effects after they p***ed away. Personally, I only had one camera I got for a birthday present and I never took enough pictures to fill up the first roll. I finally gave the camera away.
Restored, put on a different frame and turned into a low mileage 55 Chevy like you would see at some hamburger drive in or run of the mill car show..... at least that is what I heard. Made me wanna cry.
I actually had the same question myself. When you take a step back and look at it, Bad Jose is spot-on for the gas cl*** circa '69. I.e. Engine setback looks correct and things of that nature. But the original article referred to it as an altered, so I'm going to trust their judgement on this one.
It is my understanding that in the early days of the g***er cl*** any variation from a stock configuration (other than the allowable engine setback) would place the car into a "modified" cl***. Maybe this is what the AWB reference is to. Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!
As I recall, at the 1969 Popular Hot Rodding meet he had a customer running a car in gas cl*** and he didn't want to to run against the customer. If they ran different cl***es there was a better chance that they would both get into the eliminator bracket that way.
Just called a friend that was racing out of Compe***ion Engineering back in that time frame. He recalled that Bad Jose used an old style close ratio Borg Warner T-10 trans. He said it did not have reworked Liberty or Nash style internals. He also said that the 57 Corvette used the same type of B-W 4 speed, but that Jere went with a Doug Nash 5 speed and a Long shifter when he built the 63 Corvette. The 55 Chevy had a 57 Olds rear end with a spool and Summers Bros axles, the thinking is that the 57 Vette did too, but the 63 Corvette had a 9 inch Ford rear end under it. That was a long time ago..... some things are getting hard to remember after 40 years or more.
the car was restored back to stock and we ended up with the frame complete .I cut the frame up for parts in the 80s. I wish i had it complete today. still have rear end,front axle and springs, traction bars . I am using the traction bars on my g***er project. We are building a 33 Willys steel pickup called "SPARE PARTS" it is a true tribute race car. It is being built from spare parts .But these are spare parts off some pretty cool rides.LIKE the Malco G***er, Selkirk and Bork ,the Hureaka Bro,Virgil Cates. Virgil Cates dad,My Dads old g***er, Bad Jose and a bunch more
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