As I've said before and before and before, I love this car! How's Winston, he hasn't been doing any photo-ops lately.

It's looking like we'll have the car ready to go racing tomorrow!

We still have a few jobs to do, like mounting the seat and belts, shifter and parking brake etc. but it's mostly ready to go. As usual, Winston was the supervisor.

 

We had the engine running and it sounds fine. It's a 409 that's been stroked to 476 ci but it was built for street use so it only makes about 550 hp. We used to have aluminum heads on this engine but they sprung a leak so we're just running factory heads. We'll be happy enough if it cracks into the high tens for this year. The plan for next year is to build a new, race only 409 for next year. 

...love it, love it, love it....!

We went racing with the 61 this weekend. The car ran great once we got some ignition problems sorted out. (I think MSD stands for "mysterious sparking devices")

Our best time was 10.59 @ 126 mph. That was better than we were expecting from the relatively mild engine that's in the car right now.

The car isn't quite finished, we need to raise the front suspension a bit and do some things like adjusting the door gaps and finishing the interior but at least it was good enough to race.

Everybody seemed to like the Pontiac body style.

Gregory was there with his 61 too, not racing, he was in the car show. Several people mentioned that they hadn't seen a 61 Bubbletop in years and they saw two of them that day. I meant to get a picture of Gregory's car but we were busy tracking down a miss in the ignition system. We did at least get to talk to Gregory and a couple of other forum members, that was cool.

By the way, we also had the 409 powered 55 Chevy there. It ran 10.32 on it's first run but it started making noise. I think I bent an exhaust valve. We'll check it out later this week.

 

...what a nice lookin' pair of race cars (...great time for the Poncho's maiden run too)...the '55 Chevy the '61/2 Chev/Pontiac bubbletops were probably some of the cleanest and most pleasing body styles GM ever produced...they are absolutely timeless...

Good stuff the cars look great beside each other.

davelacourse wrote:

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Out of curiousity, what is curb weight of each car?

Dave

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We haven't got a weight on the Pontiac yet but we're hoping it'll be around 3,000 lbs or less at the starting line with the driver. It's likely a little more than that right now with the iron block and heads but we're really interested to get a weight on it.

The 55 Chevy weighs about 3350 full of fuel and with a driver in it.

Here's a couple more pictures of the Pontiac from the weekend.

 

 

Curiosity got the better of us so we ran the car down the street to a truck scale. The car weighed 3205 with me in it. I was hoping it would be about a hundred pounds lighter but we should be fairly close to our 3,000 lb target once we get the aluminum block and heads. The scale is really big, I'm not sure it's 100% accurate with relatively light weights but it should be reasonably close.

We worked on a few details today.

First, we thought the front end was too low so we shimmed up the front spring to give the car a better stance.

 

We also added some "409" emblems on the hoodscoop.

 

Here's a couple more pictures.

Are you planning on giving it a name like the 55 ? Or just leaving it.

Beaumont4008 wrote:

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Are you planning on giving it a name like the 55 ? Or just leaving it.

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Our original plan was to do the car as a "street and strip" with no lettering but when we decided to build it for race only we thought we might letter it. Right now we're leaning toward not lettering it but we may add a few decals in the back windows just to give it a 60's Super Stock look.

are any of the left over parts from the doner car available?