A guy at work was selling his Corvette that he had bought to race, but after he made a few minor modifications to it, and before ever racing it, Ford came out with the Shelby Cobra. He would have been in the same class as were the Cobras and he did not believe the Corvette would be competitive. I am not sure that’s true, but it gave me the opportunity to buy a slightly used hot Corvette, which I did for $4500.
Here are the specifics: It was metallic blue fastback and had the high performance 327 cubic inch (cu in) 365 HP engine. Red line on the engine was 6500 rpm. Chevy offered a fuel injected version of this engine that put out 375 HP but was very temperamental and difficult to keep running at peak performance. My car had a Holly 850 CFM double pumper carbonator. 850 CFM or Cubic Feet per Minute is the amount of air that the engine could suck through this huge four barrel carburetor. All four barrels were big enough that you could drop golf balls through them. That is big. Double pumper means that it had accelerator pumps on both the primary and the secondary barrels. These pumps shot a pencil sized stream of raw gas into the barrels when the throttle was mashed. The gas lines feeding this carburetor looked like water hoses on most cars. It had a four speed close ratio Muncie box transmission; that means that the transmission was manufactured in a GM plant in Muncie Indiana, and close ratio means that the gear ratios were pretty close to each other. First gear was long, which was fine because the engine had enough torque that it did not need a low first gear. The car would go 65 MPH in first gear, 90 is second, 120 in third and 145 in forth. Zero to 60 mph time was less than 5 seconds.
The brakes were large drum brakes with metallic linings. These were offered by GM as being superior to the early disk brakes. These brakes were virtually fade proof, and actually became much more effective the hotter they got.
There were two weak spots on the car when I got it, the tires and the ignition system. I soon replaced the factory wheels and tires with wide Goodyear Blue Streak tires which greatly improved the handling, and then I designed and installed a new transistorized ignition system that provided adequate spark for the engine to easily rev to its redline. (This is touched on in Work Advice / Solving Problems http://www.afewthingsilearned.com/408736976 .) Oh, it didn’t have a radio. Race cars don’t. I was OK with that as it was loud enough to make a radio somewhat useless, and fiber glass body Corvettes required metal shielding over the ignition system to stop the interference with the radio, and these shields were inconvenient when working on the engine and were not very effective.
As I said, I graduated from driving a 36 HP VW to this 365 HP street legal race car. I was 23 years old. In retrospect, I am not sure how I survived. I had the car for six months before I got passed. That is, on the highway, in Minnesota there was not a lot of traffic. I was going somewhere at maybe 85 – 90 mph when a pink Cadillac driven by a young female blond came up behind me and passed me. I was so stunned I let her go. True story.
I had a friend in Minneapolis who owned a cabin on a lake in Northern Minnesota. He really admired my car and kept asking how fast it would go. I had not had the car very long, and had never found a suitable stretch of road to find out, but he said that there is a rifle shot straight road on the way to his cabin. So one Friday night after work we took off to go to his cabin and on the way to try out this road. The road was straight, but not very flat, and it was night and cars in those days did not have very good headlights, but what the hell, I floored it. At 145 MPH the road was very rough, but we did almost reach red line in forth gear and fortunately did not run off the road or hit a deer. In another car which I will write about later I did the same thing on our local 280 freeway. At similar speeds it is not very level and is very curvy. But is better than this narrow two lane rural Minnesota road.
After moving to Silicon Valley, getting married, as previously discussed, the Corvette needed a brake job, which I did myself. I replaced the brake shoes with factory metallic lining shoes, and rebuilt all four slave cylinders. The shop manual said that the recommended way to set the shoes in was to do three or four panic stops from 100 MPH. Truth, it really did say that. So I drove it to a nice straight road with no cross traffic – North 1st Street in San Jose was nothing but pear orchards back then. On the third 100 MPH stop I hit the brakes and the brake pedal went all the way to the floor with absolutely no effect on my speed. So now I was going 95MPH with no brakes. I got is slowed down with gearing, and with gearing and the emergency brake got it home. The master brake cylinder had essentially blown up. It should have been rebuilt at the same time.
I would still have this car but it was stolen out of the San Jose airport parking lot while I was on an overnight trip to LA. The security guys at the airport had noticed the car, and even knew approximately when it was taken, but had no record of how the thieves got it out of the lot. The police assured me that they would find it, but never did. I still dream about this car. The dream is usually that it is found and returned to me in some state of disrepair. I never dream about any other of the cars I have owned. This one was special, and I think the way the ownership was involuntarily terminated left me with a missing piece in my life, which I subconsciously try to fill in my sleep.
I quickly replaced the blue Corvette with a used 1969 427 cu in 390 HP monster of a Corvette. It was very fast, but rattled, squeaked and stuff was always falling off it; in other words it was a piece of crap, and I quickly sold it and bought a BMW 2002.