My first car was a brand new 1966 SS396 Malibu - metallic blue with a black interior. It was a great looking car, but a POS (Piece of S###) mechanically. It had a 24,000 warranty. I recall telling my father one day that the car had 23,980 miles on the odometer and the transmission was slipping. He followed me to the dealerhip with his pickup and ended up pushing me the last mile into the dealership with an old tire tied on to his front bumper. The service writer asked me what was wrong and I told him the transmission was slipping and it still had 5 miles on the warranty; he said let me drive it and see. He cranked it up put it in gear and it didn't move, so he asked me how I got there and I just pointed to my fatther's pickup.
As soon as it came out of the shop, I traded that POS in on a new 1968 GTO that was a legitimate superstar car. The Pontiac HO 400 made the Chevy 396 feel like a 4 cylinder; it was superstrong, but it needed new plugs, points and condenser and timing set perfectly every 1,000 miles or it ran almost as weak as the 396 Chevy. I burned off a set of tires about every 8,000 miles. I had the heads ported, polished and matched; put in a mechanical distributor advance, and did the old trick of presettng the rear butterflies on the quadrajet. You could punch the gas at 70 miles per hour on the expressway and break the tires loose. I ran a 12.9 at 109 at the local drag races. In all of Memphis, Tennessee there were only two street cars faster - a '66 327/375 Nova that had been stripped to just a drivers seat and had 10" slicks, and a Plymouth GTX with a 440/375 (six pack) that also had 10" street slicks. All of the other supposed muscle cars just didn't go - hemis were a joke, they needed a mile to wind out.
I kept the GTO until I finished college, got married and started a family. I needed something that was more of a family car, so I bought a 455 Olds. I got a great job after college, but it involved a lot of travel. About 1:00 AM on a Saturday night (Sunday morning) I was driving home on a two lane highway after a late night's work in a town about 100 miles from home. As there was no one else on the road, I opened the Olds up to get home sooner. About 30 miles from the state line I saw a pair of headlights way behind me and I caught a glimpse of them on and off for the next 28 miles or so. As I approached the state line, I thought that if there was a cop out at that hour, that's where he would be, so I backed off the Olds to let the car behind me catch up and go through first. About a mile from the state line the headlights came behind me and he turned on his blue lights (red then?). My only thought was that I was going to jail. He came up to me and asked for my license. He said "You're kind of in a hurry tonight?" and I said yes, I had been out of town all week and wanted to get home to my family. He then said "I want to thank you for slowing down; my new Ford interceptor here runs good but it was wide open, getting hot and starting to smoke, and I was afraid I was going to get fired for blowing it up". He was very sincere in his thanks.
"I got you on my radar at 138 mph back about 35 miles, and I was running over 150 and couldn't keep up - that's one fast Oldsmobile you got there."
He gave me a speeding ticket for 138 mph and told me I had to be in court on Monday morning. That Monday morning I called the telephone number on the ticket and told someone that I couldn't make it to court as I had to go out of town again; they told me to send a check for $10 cash to them at such and such address and that would take care of it. And it did - absolutely true story.
P. S. the '73 Olds 455 had a 2.73 rear end.
otfl
Unfortunatly,I Still cant figure out how to post pics full size yet. I Read the Link a Million times and it just aint happening for me. Anyway, here it is...
