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.
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Prince Edward Island
'64 Parisienne CS "barn find" - last on the road in '86 ... Owner Protection Plan booklet, original paint, original near-mint aqua interior, original aqua GM floor mats, original 283, factory posi, and original rust.
How's Winston, he hasn't been doing any photo-ops lately.
Winston was pretty sick. He lost a bunch of fur and was having a hard time walking but he's on some medicine now that's really working. He's almost as good as new.
We've got a race this weekend at Grand Bend and Winston's coming. He loves to go to the races.
We're hoping to have the Pontiac ready to go for this race but I'm not sure we'll have it done in time. It's a car show as well as a race and a few guys are bringing their unfinished project cars so we might just bring it anyway, even if it's not ready to race.
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.
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 great time for first time out, well done. I went to the gimli dragstrip this weekend to watch the thunderjam race with gravedigger and some jet cars but I think I would have rather watched your cars go down the track. I wish we had a nostalgic race at our track.
...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...
Out of curiousity, what is curb weight of each car?
Dave
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.
Are you planning on giving it a name like the 55 ? Or just leaving it.
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.
1956 Pontiac Pathfinder 2dr sedan, 496 - dyno'd 545 hp, stick shift, 4.11 posi - Hot Rod
( The launch )
