Tom Carrigan’s 1939 Chevrolet is absolutely friggin’ insane and we love it. Powered by an Allison V-1710 12-cylinder engine that was purchased from epic BangShift hero EJ Potter, this car has been a years long garage project for Carrigan. Thankfully he has been taking videos, starting from the earliest stages and right on through the recent times where the car is fired up and running. What would possess someone to take a 1939 Chevy, widen it by a foot and lengthen it by four feet? The specter of being one of the few people on Earth with a functional piston airplane engine powered car is one of them and we’re sure there’s a healthy dose of “because I could” in there as well. Don’t get us wrong, the thing looks wacky but that’s what happens when you drop an insanely huge aircraft engine in the front of a car and want to be able to use it.
As you’ll see in the videos, the car rides on a completely custom build chassis that Carrigan fabricated. It uses the front end out of a GM half ton van to carry the weight of the big Ally and there was LOTS of metalwork to do in order to stretch the hood and widen the car. The engine makes about 1,300hp and it is fed through a Torqueflite transmission to a worked up Ford 9″ rear end. It looks like something out of a crazed gangster movie or something from the days when cars like Cadillacs and others had huge stretched noses on them.
The videos are cool because they are narrated by Carrigan and tell the story of the car and give great history on the vaunted Allison engine as well. We recommed watching them in order because you’ll see how the whole thing started coming together and then you’ll ultimately see it fire up. OH! We forgot to mention that Tom is running MegaSquirt EFI to feed the fuel to the engine. How awesome is that?! We’re dragging our feet on the Buford EFI swap and this guy converted a WWII aircraft engine to EFI from scratch and is controlling it with MegaSquirt. Carrigan owns us.
We’re going to let you see this monster for yourselves. We bet it sure is fun roll down the road and into car shows with. Burnouts at basically any speed are a given with the amount of power that this car makes. Now a message directly to Tom. — We love that it runs and that you drive it. We NEED video of this thing smoking the tires!!!
WATCH THE VIDEOS BELOW FOR THE FULL STORY ON THE ALLISON POWERED 1939 CHEVROLET OF TOM CARRINGTON –
Wait for all the Chevy lovers to start crying that he threw the small block away!
Great basic idea but lose the wheels replacing them with steelies with hubcaps, widen the rear track and paint it gloss black – then you’d really have the mob ride from hell!
Even though its a Chevy…
Those cars came with in-line 6-cylinders, you ford sucking moron.
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proof once again, that some guys are talented enough they can do anything.
I’ll take a Allison over an LS any day.
i love how the ultra long nose stretch
makes it look like a whacked out funnycar….
and its hard to argue with 1300hp and an allison
motor.
I need this in my life.
However one criticism is that the rear wheels are too small for the rear. The rear wheels need to move out a lot more. Get some wider rims and tires, or widened the rear end.
Awesome build.