Don Dames’ 1970 Chevrolet Nova wears Green Mist paint and runs a six-cylinder rather than any of the big-block options that usually headline Nova stories. It sat in storage for years and emerged roughly 80 percent original, a survival rate that eludes almost every Nova built for straight-line speed. Read on for why the six was actually the most popular engine that year, and why honest survivors like this one are getting harder to find than restored SS cars.
Posts Tagged: Chevrolet Nova
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.
A 2025 highlight reel of car-meet burnouts and exhaust notes is going viral for an unlikely reason — a plain four-door Nova stealing the spotlight from a 425-horsepower Hemi Challenger. Here’s what actually made the crowd favorites roar, and why a spec sheet rarely predicts which car steals the show.
A beat-up 1972 Chevrolet Nova wearing dog-dish hubcaps and a decade of patina doesn’t look like it could outrun anything on four wheels. Under the hood, a twin-supercharged LS2 built by Kurt Urban makes 1,160 horsepower and sends the car into nine-second quarter-mile territory. Here’s the story behind one of the internet’s most famous sleepers.
One careful owner put just 17,000 miles on this 1966 Chevrolet Nova SS before the current owner tracked it down and restored it — and it’s a genuine, factory-built SS, not a badge job. Low-mile survivors like this one are rare precisely because most Novas of this era got driven hard and used up. Read on to find out what makes an original like this one different from anything else on the market.
A 1974 Chevy Nova SS survived insurance surcharges, smog-era compression cuts, and federally mandated battering-ram bumpers — the exact combination that ended muscle cars everywhere else. One budget builder bought it for half the asking price and hauled it across town for a dyno pull. The numbers explain why an unloved model year still has fans arguing in the comments.
A 1968 Chevy Nova has traded its small-block V8 for the turbocharged straight-six out of a Toyota Supra, and the numbers make the swap impossible to dismiss: over 860 wheel horsepower, more than double what any factory Nova SS ever produced. Here’s how a 2JZ ended up under a muscle car’s hood, and whether the swap actually holds up as a daily-drivable build.
The 1968-1974 Chevrolet Nova rode a 111-inch wheelbase with room for a genuine 396 big-block — and, at the right dealership, a 427, turning an economy car into one of the muscle car era’s best-hidden street fighters. One owner even drove his 396 Nova 3,100 miles from California to Florida in 38 hours. Once dismissed as a cheap compact, the Nova has become one of the most underrated classics you can buy.
A patina-caked 1969 Chevrolet Nova with a 383 stroker under the hood has racked up nearly 400,000 views without a single line of fresh paint. Its owner chose rust over a respray, turning a fifty-year-old beater into one of the internet’s favorite sleepers. Here’s the story behind the build, and why the untouched look might be worth more than a show-quality finish.
This 1969 Chevrolet Nova SS runs a performance-built 396 with Edelbrock aluminum heads behind a four-speed manual, and RamblinAround caught it cold-starting, driving, and doing a proper burnout at Fast Lane Classic Cars. Viewers as far away as Argentina and Australia flooded the comments with specific memories of owning one just like it. One detail keeps coming up: the nostalgic squeak of a well-worn clutch pedal. Watch to hear what a real, driven 396 Nova sounds like fifty-plus years on.
Don Baskin’s name never comes up when enthusiasts argue about America’s greatest private car collections. It probably should. The Covington, Tennessee truck dealer has filled roughly 400,000 square feet of warehouses with more than a thousand vehicles – somewhere around 20 Novas, about 25 Hellcats, and a multi-time NMCA championship racing career almost nobody outside West Tennessee knew about.
This 1970 Chevrolet Nova wears a modern LS swap and carbon fiber accents, but the platform underneath was already capable of serious performance straight from the factory — Chevrolet’s own 396-badged, actually 402-cubic-inch, big block was available for just $475 that year. Read on to find out what Chevrolet’s engineers offered buyers before anyone thought to drop in an LS.
