Chevrolet Built the 1966 Nova SS’s Best Engine for Just One Year – This One Skips It for a Supercharged 550-HP LS1

A Los Angeles shop took a budget-grade 1966 Chevy Nova SS and ignored the car’s rare factory L79 history entirely, swapping in a supercharged, built LS1 making 550 horsepower instead. See how Lakeside Speed and Shine turned Chevrolet’s cheapest compact into one of the cleanest restomods YouTube has seen all year.

Chevrolet built the 1966 Nova SS to be the affordable alternative to a Chevelle or a Corvette — a compact two-door that started under $2,600 and still looked the part. For one single model year, though, Chevy let buyers check a box that turned that budget coupe into a genuine muscle car: the L79, a 327-cubic-inch V8 factory-rated at 350 horsepower. Order a 1966 Nova SS today and you will not find that engine option anywhere in the brochure, because Chevrolet pulled it after a single season and never brought it back. One shop in Los Angeles decided the factory’s answer from six decades ago was not interesting enough anyway, and tore into a 1966 Nova SS with a plan that skips the L79 story completely in favor of something far louder.

A Shop Called Lakeside Speed & Shine Takes On a Nova

The build comes from Lakeside Speed & Shine, profiled by the YouTube channel Autotopia LA in a walkaround that has pulled in more than 270,000 views. Host Shawn calls the finished car one of the cleanest builds he has featured on a channel that has covered everything from drift cars to million-dollar restorations, and the comment section backs him up. Longtime viewers kept repeating variations of the same line in the replies: this is the one build they would actually want parked in their own garage, not just admire from a distance.

That reaction is notable because the 1966 Nova SS was never supposed to be the showstopper of the GM lineup. It was Chevrolet’s compact, built on the Chevy II platform specifically to undercut the intermediate-size Chevelle on price while still giving buyers a sporty-looking option. Lakeside Speed & Shine’s build leans into that contrast hard: a car that started life as budget transportation now wears a supercharged, built LS1 making 550 horsepower, sits on a chassis reworked with TCI suspension components, and carries an interior finished by Elegance Auto Interiors to a standard most owners reserve for cars twice its price.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The One-Year Engine Chevrolet Almost Forgot

To understand why this particular Nova is such a departure, it helps to know what Chevrolet actually offered buyers in 1966. The Nova SS trim had existed since 1963 as mostly a dress-up package — bucket seats, extra trim, a tachometer option — without serious engine firepower to back it up. That changed for 1966 only, when Chevrolet made the L79 327 available in the Chevy II body for the first and only time. Rated at 350 horsepower and typically paired with a four-speed Muncie manual, the L79 turned the Nova SS into a legitimate stoplight threat almost overnight, a lightweight compact that could embarrass cars costing considerably more.

The catch was scarcity. Auction house RM Sotheby’s has documented that of roughly 20,986 Nova Super Sport hardtops built for 1966, only about 5,481 left the factory with the L79 under the hood — a small fraction of an already limited production run. Chevrolet dropped the option after that single season, shifting its performance focus to the Chevelle and, within a couple of years, the brand-new Camaro. A documented, numbers-matching L79 Nova today has brought six figures at auction in top condition precisely because so few were built and fewer still survive unmolested.

Inside Lakeside Speed & Shine’s Build

Rather than chase that rare factory history, this particular Nova takes a completely different route to speed. In place of any version of the small-block 327, the car runs a built LS1 wearing a supercharger, tuned to 550 horsepower — more than 200 horses beyond anything Chevrolet ever offered from the factory in this body, L79 included. The drivetrain sits on a chassis reworked with TCI suspension components, the kind of underpinning upgrade that lets a show-quality car still get driven hard rather than trailered everywhere it goes.

The interior is where the build separates itself from a typical weekend restomod. Elegance Auto Interiors handled the cabin, and the attention shows in the details commenters singled out specifically: custom-shaped valve covers designed to disguise the LS engine’s plainer stock pieces, hidden ignition coils, and plumbing routed so cleanly that one viewer called it “almost too clean to drive.” Several commenters who said they regularly nitpick show cars for a living admitted they could not find anything to criticize on this one — a rare consensus for a build thread.

Why First-Generation Novas Keep Attracting This Treatment

This is not an isolated case. The first-generation Chevy II Nova — compact, light, and built on a simple unibody platform — has become one of the restomod world’s favorite starting points precisely because it was never meant to be special. Its unassuming shape and comparatively low price on the used market make it easier to justify a six-figure build budget than a car that is already a seven-figure collector piece. Shops like Lakeside Speed & Shine are not alone in treating these cars as blank canvases for modern LS-swap power, chassis-engineering firms like TCI built an entire product line around exactly this kind of first-generation GM compact, and interior houses like Elegance Auto Interiors have built reputations doing cabin work on cars most people once treated as disposable.

The price gap between a rough driver-quality first-gen Nova and a documented L79 survivor is enormous, and that gap is exactly what keeps shops busy. A clean but unremarkable six-cylinder or small-block Nova can often be bought for a fraction of what a numbers-matching muscle car commands, which leaves real budget for the engine, chassis, and interior work that turns it into something unique. That math is part of why Autotopia LA keeps finding builds like this one to feature — the channel has built its following by profiling exactly this kind of transformation, showing viewers what is possible when a shop is not constrained by trying to preserve factory originality.

Seen that way, this particular Nova is less an outlier and more an especially well-executed example of a trend that has reshaped how enthusiasts think about “cheap” old muscle cars. The L79 story is part of what makes the 1966 Nova SS historically significant. This build is a reminder that significance and speed do not have to come from the same source — and that a shop with the right suspension, the right engine builder, and the right interior trimmer can make a budget compact outrun its own factory legend.

None of that diminishes what Chevrolet actually built in 1966. The L79 remains one of the more significant footnotes in Chevy II history — a one-year window where a company car built to compete with the Ford Falcon briefly became something enthusiasts still chase at auction sixty years later. But the Lakeside Speed & Shine build makes a different kind of case: that the Nova’s real legacy might not be the rare factory option most owners never got to order, but the fact that its simple, lightweight body has given generations of builders a canvas sturdy enough to handle however much power they want to throw at it.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.