Here’s an example of the stupid fun that we used to have at Car Craft magazine. This was shot in 2002 at the magazine’s shop in Gardena, California.
At the far right is a ’92 Z28 that I bought for $200 because we needed the trans and clutch pedals out of it, plus the rearend, for my ’82 Camaro that Terry McGean and I hoped to build into a competitor for the Grassroots Motorsports $2002 Challenge. That never happened, and I ended up donating the ’82 to John Nelson of Chevy High Performance magazine because he wanted the factory fiberglass hood from the car. He installed the hood on his own project car, and during a pass at the LACR dragstrip, the outer skin separated from the framework and went flying. I think he put a photo in the mag.
The next car to the left is a brown ’77 Nova four-door that I bought for a couple hundred bucks, though I honestly can’t remember why. I’d say that it was a parts car from the Disco Nova, but I can’t remember what, if any, parts I took off the sedan. I do remember Sawzalling the nose off the car and you can see in the photo that the entire core support and radiator is gone. We decided to blow up the 305 one day, and that’s what’s going on here. I flipped the throttle spring to hold the carb at WOT and fired it up. As is usually the case, it refused to explode in any kind of glorious manner. It did catch fire a little bit, but that’s not fire or smoke in the photo. Kevin Oeste, now of V8 TV, was just keeping the engine cool as it revved with no radiator, and it steamed a lot.
Now the worst part of the story. See the fastback Mustang at the far left? It appeared in the parking lot one day when a neighbor was moving out of his industrial unit. It was a super clean car with no motor or trans and with no seats in it. The guy was trying to sell it rather than have to move the car to his new shop. Asking price? $2,500. I offered the guy $2,000 and he said no. He later had two guys standing there bidding on it, and the buyer paid $3,000. Today, that’s at least a $12,000 car.
