Features Corvette hot rods - picture thread

Enloe that last pic is interesting. I have seen it before and may have commented on it. This is Vicious Vette prior to the blower sticking out of the hood. I would be curious as to what the induction setup was at this time. My guess is this is 1965 or possibly 1966. Bones Balough built the engine as it ran in 1967 and it was blown at that time. Also the rollbar is a bit different from the similar chrome rollbar the car ran in 67 and thereafter.

 

just two today.

1962 winternationals with Don Nicholson in a vette



Jolly Green giant II

 

Loudbang in the interest of correctness the first picture you posted is Dick Taylor's 57 fuelie that was tuned by Wade/Nicholson. In the other lane is Mazmanian's 61 with Rich Siroonian driving. This is of course before they redesigned the wheelwells. You are correct that this is the 1962 Winternationals

 

This is what is great about the HAMB. We have so many of the people that were there or actually KNOW the history on so many of these cars.

 

THIS IS A WILD PAINTJOB

 

That black one is awesome. The way the cove moldings are cut it looks to have a tilt front end too.

 

Found this while going through this damn Apple computer, all my pictures are screwed up or mis-named and I can't find anything. I need a shot and a beer!

Pat

 

Here's another I took at the GG show at Rhinebeck.

Pat

 

Another shot of the white one.

 

I know both the black 54/55 and the 60. Both good guys. Local from town here, part of the Conklin Crew, (Radir wheels) also part of the Dead Man's Curve Club. Sorry, the cars are all show and no go. I have been going to their events for 25+ years. Me and Butch were the only racers in the club.

 

Jim,

You are to funny, I remember your classic line from the past, that's not a rollbar that a show bar.

jp

 

Be still my heart.

 

found this pic while cruising the web today

 

Here is another one.
I wonder what the story is on this one.

 

Sorry guys been slacking on posting vettes. I have been exploiting a source for altereds that may go away soon. Maybe middle of next week will be back to fining more vettes.

 

Enloe I can't tell you about the corvette but the candy Riviera (I think) next to it looks like the car that I have seen Tommy Ivo with when he was touring the northeast and drove it around instead of his rig in the early 60's.

Pat

 

This is a Pontiac prototype but it sure took a lot of styling cues from a corvette. Definately not a hot rod, more like a custom.

 

You guys have been good waiting patiently and not shutting down the HAMB so here are some new/old ones.


1961 fuelie test
The car was borrowed from a local dealer, Harry Mann Chevrolet in Los Angeles. It was brand new, with just 250 miles on the odometer, but Mann’s mechanics went through the car to make sure everything was working properly. The only modification they made was to intake valve lash (set at 0.008-inch rather than the factory spec 0.012) “to increase effective intake timing slightly,” Brock said. “Everything else was absolutely stock.”

In this case that meant a $3,934 1961 Corvette; the fuel-injected, 315hp V-8, the most powerful engine offered that year (and a $484.20 option); four-speed manual transmission ($188.30); Positraction diff with 4.11 gears ($43.05); plus a radio, heater, and whitewall tires, bringing the as-tested price to $5,078.25.


The fuelie’s driveability came up several times in the story. He described it as a “full-blown competition engine… [that] can be driven on city streets without being unmanageable.” He did call the engine’s idle “a little ragged and fast (about 950 rpm), but with the high-performance camshaft and closer-than-stock intake valve setting, this was to be expected.”

That bit of engine tuning, plus the 4.11 gears and a set of sticky Butyl tires got Brock down the quarter-mile at just a tick under 105 mph.







Now for comparison a 1962 fuelie test with the new 327

Brock called his story “Big Vette” because of the significant changes underhood for the ’62 model year. The venerable 283 had been bored and stroked to 327 inches, and Brock’s car had the range-topping fuelie, making 360 hp and 352 lb-ft of torque thanks to the fuel injection, high-compression heads, forged pistons, and a hot cam. The engine was joined to the optional four-speed manual transmission and Positraction rearend with 4.10 gears.

The extra 44 cubic inches for the Corvette came about because of an economy move by the larger Chevrolet passenger cars,” he explained. In 1961, three V-8s were available for Chevy cars: the 283, 348, and 409. The 348 was intended to be a more powerful option than the base 283 “but one that would still be docile enough for an automatic transmission.” Yet the 348 “never was the ‘natural’ that the smaller 283 had been when it came to performance in relation to size, and it cost quite a bit more to make than the 283.” Chevy powertrain engineers experimented with the 283 block, enlarging the bore by 1/8 inch and lengthening the stroke by 1/4 inch. The resulting 327ci engine “had more power than the standard 348 engine, was cheaper to build, was lighter in weight, and with smaller displacement produced better mileage than the 348.”

“The first thing we noticed when driving the ’62 360 hp Corvette was the increased low speed torque that accompanied the increased displacement,” Brock said. The jump up in peak torque from the previous year’s fuel-injected 283 was substantial—20 percent, he noted—and “it reaches its maximum at 700 rpm lower engine speed.”

Yet any hopes for blazing e.t.’s at the strip were dashed by the lack of traction from the Vette’s bias-ply tires. In as-delivered tune and with tires set at 24 psi, Brock’s first pass was 14.22 seconds at 102.97 mph. “A half dozen runs later, we had only managed to raise the speed to 103.98 mph and lower the e.t. to 14.12.”

As it turned out, Mickey Thompson was at the strip that day testing a dragster, and Brock asked him to try the Vette. “After a trial run, he turned in a speed of 105.14 mph in 13.89 seconds. The difference between our times and Mickey’s was his shifting speed. Mickey used full throttle ‘power shifts’ while we released the throttle slightly between shifts. Power shifts give better results, but unless you are experienced, you’d better stay away from them









Now some RACING versions

The scene is Daytona Beach, February 1957. Hot Rod magazine Editor Wally Parks, there to drive his magazine's “Suddenly” Plymouth Savoy project car for a speed record, walks the beach snapping photos to augment coverage of the event. During his walk he captures Bill Mitchell's SR-2 Corvette in repose, waiting for its turn to run on the hard-packed sand.

Mitchell's SR-2 was one of three built by Chevrolet in 1956. The first was made for Harley Earl's son Jerry, who wanted to go sports-car racing—in a Ferrari. As you would imagine, the elder Earl, then a GM vice president, didn't want his son racing some foreign job. So a car was commissioned, utilizing custom fiberglass bodywork and chassis pieces tested in action at Sebring.

The Sebring connection is where this car got its name. Because the 1956 Sebring Corvettes were dubbed SR—the initials meaning Sebring Racer, Sports Racing, or Special Racing, depending on which expert you believe—this car was called SR-2 as the second Corvette to spring from that development program.
When Bill Mitchell, then Earl's chief man in design, saw Jerry Earl's race car, he wanted one, too. The two SR-2s aren't twins; Mitchell's car was wider, lighter, and had a tall stabilizing fin integrated into the body behind the driver's seat. Earl's car was blue and white; Mitchell's was red and white. At some venues, including Daytona, it was fitted with a clear canopy stretching from the windshield back to the rear wing.

(The third SR-2 was essentially a show car built for GM President Harlow Curtice. He kept it for just a year before selling it.)




The line on the cover of Hot Rod magazine’s October 1964 issue promised that the “Fastest Vette of All” was inside. Color photos—rare for the magazine back in those days—showed a blood-red race car with gold-leaf lettering, a chute billowing out behind it on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

In the span of just a few months Jack Lufkin and his “Brand X” Corvette (which was actually painted a brilliant orange) ran a 193.44 mph class record at the salt, nabbed the NHRA quarter-mile speed record in the BM/Sp class at 131.95 mph, and the NHRA half-mile record at 151.51 mph.

And all that speed came from a naturally aspirated, fuel-injected small-block.

The foundation for this race car was a ’60 Corvette chassis Lufkin found in a junkyard. He drilled lightening holes wherever he could, and had Frank Kurtis (legendary Indy car builder, among other things) construct a beam-axle frontend with stock spindles and brakes and an Indy-type torsion bar suspension. Lufkin retained the Vette’s rearend, swapping ring-and-pinion gears as needed—tall 3.08s for Bonneville, 4.11s for the half-mile drags, and 5.12s for the quarter. Magnesium Halibrand wheels were mounted at each corner, wearing “different skins,” wrote LeRoi Smith, depending on whether Lufkin was at the track or on the salt.

The car’s interior “is like austerville,” Smith said: two bucket seats, a rollbar, belts, and a very simple dashboard with a mechanical tach plus oil and water temp gauges. Fuel was carried in a fabricated six-gallon tank in front of the radiator, while a 15-gallon water tank rode in the trunk to provide extra fluid for cooling and ballast for traction.

The engine started life as a standard ’64 small-block, though Lufkin stroked it to 3.6875 inches to displace 371 cubes. The heads were ported, flow-tested, and fitted with bigger valves; and the forged Dyke pistons pushed the compression ratio to 13:1. An Isky 505-C cam went in the block, Hilborn port fuel injection fed the mill, a Mallory Mini-Mag fired the mix, and a special set of square-port headers by Doug vented the exhaust. Backing the engine was a Vette four-speed transmission fitted with Hurst linkage.
All that engineering was covered by a custom body built at Kurtis’ shop. It was meant to be a replica of a ’62, but the proportions seem all wrong. That’s because it was treated to a 6-inch channel, and the lower edges of the body tapered inward towards the full belly pan. That and the giant wheelwell cutouts, filled grille, and tiny windshield gave the car a look all its own, sort of skinny and flattened.








Earl Richey was for several years the field rep for Schiefer Clutches. On his "off" weekends he ran this '63 Corvette split-window coupe in California Modified Eliminator races. Here, he lifts off at Irwindale Raceway, a SoCal track now long gone. Note the long traction bars



Randy Ross' '65 coupe is shown here running F/Gas at Bristol, Tennessee's famed "Thunder Valley." Photo by Marty Johnson, from the Jim Hill Collection





Getting the tires up to racing temperature was a ritual made easier with the help of a couple of crewmen, who kept the car squared up in the water box while the tires spun. Here, Tom Turner's F/Gas '65 smokes 'em prior to making a run at the NHRA Winternationals. Photo by Leslie Lovett/NHRA, from the Jim Hill Collection



Pete Arend's "Mongoose" '63 split-window started out as a street-driven daily driver. Arend promptly sunk thousands into his project, and eventually it morphed into the beast shown here. Note the long intake tubes, "up in the air" stance, radically chopped rear fenderwells, and quick-change rear axle. Arend's Stingray went from its original small-block to big-block Chevy powerplants, and finally to a 426 Dodge Hemi. The 'goose is shown here running at Palm Beach International Raceway (now known as Moroso Motorsports Park).

With the ever popular three taillights mod.




Seeking an index advantage, many Corvette racers entered their cars in unusual classes. Econo Altered rules, for example, specified a single four-barrel carb, restricted cylinder-head modifications, and an automatic transmission. Even so, this '65 C/Econo Altered Sting Ray made enough horsepower to pull the wheels off the line at the Gatornationals in the late '70s. Photo by Marty Johnson, from the Jim Hill Collection





Double entendre aside, Jim Warter's '63 "Joint Venture" coupe once captured the Competition Eliminator points championship in the NHRA's Division 6 (hence, its No. 61 designation). The sharp-looking Vette had everything necessary for hard Comp Eliminator racing, including a 9,500-rpm small-block Chevy, a four-link rear suspension, polished lightweight wheels, and hard-starting line launches. Photo by Tom Schultz, from the Jim Hill Collection




Dallas' Bill Hielscher made quite a career for himself at the wheel of this '65 327/350 roadster. Hielscher ran mostly in the AHRA, where he was a multiple major-event winner and World Champion. Once, on a whim, he packed up two engines, several intake manifolds, and headed to Bonneville, where the Corvette broke a sackful of land speed records. Here, Bill poses with a few of the trophies he won early in his career.



The Reinford brothers, from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, began drag racing with a '37 Chevy Gasser dubbed "Moose" for its large size. They later graduated to this C2 Vette, running in both the Gas and D/Altered classes. In 2005, the Reinford brothers were inducted into the East Coast Drag Time Drag Racing Hall of Fame, in Henderson, North Carolina.





Heating the tires before making a run is a drag-racing ritual. Here, Berkley, Michigan's Paul Mercure warms the Goodyears at the NHRA Summernationals in Englishtown, New Jersey, during the late '70s. Mercure's "Check Mate" '67 was a stalwart Modified Eliminator competitor, running various lower Gas classes with small-block Chevy power and 9-second passes.

 

Just some of stock ones today LOL. But they are NICE.

1957 convertible Fuelie











How about a 1958





How about a WHITE 1958





Maybe a 1959

 

Not a vette but a guy who became famous in one. BO LAWS in the beginning. Same paint scheme as the corvette will be.



OUTLAW at launch great shot.......




Bill Bussarts H/Gas 62 leaves hard at an NHRA Winston Championship Series points meet at Warner-Robins Dragway in Georgia. A 288ci small-block Chevy with Crower fuel-injection system wound to 9,000-plus rpm



unknown Strange rear wheels unless the axle just broke.




the Man needs no intro great shots.

1961 Big John Mazmanian Corvette drag racing



The engine




So yesterday we left off with a 59 got a 1960 today.








dual quads.

 

???