Are what you wanted and what you got necessarily the same thing? Maybe. We envision the ideal and get real life instead. Sometimes it's a matter of ignorance and sometimes it's really a matter of time. Projects tend to dominate all else when they are young. The longer you spend with them the more your enthusiasm wanes, and the more likely that the hot trends will bend corners and you'll be left with a cliche instead of a car. Things that were leading edge the first time you opened your mouth are now common currency, totally mainstream. You begin seeing adverts for stuff that was flat unobtainium when you began your project.
Maybe it would be best to skirt the issue altogether. Buy a well-preserved driver, bag it, put some pretty legs on it, and go to town without ever looking back. Bob Saltarelli did that. Bought and drove.
"I found the car at the Pomona swap meet. For $6,000. It was driver quality. I drove it to work for 2 years." Then that eternal bugaboo, paint jail and its legacy of anguish and impatience, lifted its scuzzy head.
"Because of painter problems with a body-off restoration on a '55 Bel Air," winced Bob, "I decided to do just a paint job and maybe some 17-inch wheels on the Chevelle, you know, to have a car to drive in the summer. One thing led to another and the Chevelle is what it is today." Yeah, Bob, something that goes and handles and stops and rides a ton better than the original. Something that's blissful to the eye. Something that's at once contemporary and vintage. Look around. Retro. A trend that even conservative Detroit has glommed onto.
It didn't take Bob very long to put a face on his current passion or to go from tooling just a driver to something a lot more subjective. He was burning the tires off it in less than a year. He'd concentrated on three mandates: stance, color, and the tire and rim combination, all integrated quite successfully, we think. Last March, he took the 'Velle to the first annual Goodguys get-together at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, California. He won the award for Best Homebuilt Car award.
Saltarelli is a 51-year old longshoreman, so he would have had an operator's license at the very end of the old Muscle Car Trauma, not in time to buy anything off the showroom floor, but certainly at a distinct advantage when it came to cheap and plentiful pre-owned iron that the insurance companies wouldn't touch with your 10-foot pole.
Now, a lifetime later, Bob could do what he wanted with whatever he wanted. We could call it Pro Touring but it isn't Pro anything. It's simply Bob's vision with just the right amount of mechanical enhancement and eye-candy upgrades.
Musclecars are good-looking land sharks packed with wildly undisciplined talent. They have too much torque and not enough social skills to put it to use effectively. It was as if the only thing that mattered was that it went like hell in straight line, albeit with wheelhop. Braking and handling? These aren't sports cars, Sammy. They were built to bellow, burn rubber, and beat down a dragstrip in a time before "socially acceptable" illegally entered the lexicon. Tetraethyl lead was the key and it was pennies a gallon. The luster of America's best years was rapidly going dim. We had the power then, that was for damn sure, but don't forget that the dinosaurs evolved into birds.
Bob kept chipping. Got himself a '73 454 cylinder case, had Contemporary Auto Machine poke it 60-over and do the blueprinting, balancing, and align boring required. Since our hero was only looking to scare up some asphalt and not annihilate the rest of the world, he kept the compression ratio for those Speed-Pro pistons at a safe-and-sane 10:1. The Comp hydraulic roller comes in easy with 230 duration at 0.050-inch and 0.520-inch lift on both valves. A Milodon steel 8-quart oil pan and an Edelbrock front cover seal off the lower end.