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A 1969 Chevy Nova rolled into Roadkill Garage as a bare shell — and rolled out packing more than 1,000 horsepower. Hosts David Freiburger and Steve Dulcich built the entire street/strip package from scratch, then hauled it straight to the track to see if the numbers held up. Fans are calling it one of the show’s best comebacks yet.
A 1972 Chevy Nova that spent four decades sinking into the dirt gets a second chance in Hagerty’s newest budget build. Restoration duo Dustin Hallinan and John Brito set themselves a brutal number: bring it back to life for less than $5,000. What they find underneath says a lot about what’s still possible in today’s classic car market.
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.
This 1965 Chevy Nova SS wears a body Chevrolet never paired with a 406 cubic-inch V8, a Ford 9-inch rear end, or rack-and-pinion steering — all changes bolted on by a builder chasing quarter-mile performance over factory correctness. Sub-frame connectors, a trunk-mounted battery, and Mickey Thompson drag radials all point toward a car built to launch hard, not just look sharp at a cruise-in. RamblinAround walked through the full build with photos and receipts in hand at Fast Lane Classic Cars. Watch to see how far off the factory blueprint a serious Nova build can go.
Regular Car Reviews built a whole episode around a technicality: strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as a factory Nova SS, just an option package bolted onto an ordinary Chevy compact. What starts as a joke about badge integrity turns into a real argument for why this particular 1970 Nova, and its unswapped 350 small-block, deserves more credit than its “fake” SS badge suggests. Viewers from as far as Argentina showed up with their own Nova stories. So is the SS badge a lie, or just a loophole?
High Tech Corvette put a nearly 1,000-horsepower C7 Z06 up against a purpose-built Chevy Nova in a straightforward roll race, and the result was not the foregone conclusion the horsepower gap suggests. Viewers who expected the modern Corvette to walk away were surprised by how close it actually was. Watch to see which car takes it.
This 1971 Chevrolet Nova arrived at Vanguard Motor Sales with barely a paragraph of description, but the comments filled in the blanks fast — viewers pegged it as a serious resto-mod running what one commenter called ‘7.4 liters of fun,’ shorthand for a 454 cubic-inch big block Chevrolet never offered in this body style. The amber lighting and paint drew their own praise, with one viewer calling it a flat-out show stopper. Watch to see a compact built as a blank canvas rather than a numbers-matching original.
1964 handed the humble Chevy II its first-ever V8 option, a 283 cubic inch small-block available in 195 or 220 horsepower tune, right as the brand-new Chevelle arrived to steal its thunder in the same showroom. Over 25,000 buyers chose the small-block Chevy II anyway, proving this overshadowed compact had more going for it than anyone chasing the flashier new mid-size ever gave it credit for.
Chevrolet built three very different Camaros under one badge in the late 1960s, one dressed to be noticed, one built to go fast, and one so quietly race-bred that Chevy barely admitted it existed. The RS brought hideaway headlights and showroom flash, the SS brought big-block muscle, and the unadvertised Z28 brought a 302 small-block engineered specifically to win Trans-Am races. Read on to find out how rare that racing option really was, and why so few dealers even knew to offer it.
This 1966 Chevy II Nova left the factory rated for a fraction of the horsepower it claims today, after a build that replaced nearly everything Chevrolet originally installed. Getting to over 870 horsepower required a completely different engine, a reinforced chassis, and drivetrain components built to survive power levels the factory unibody was never designed to handle. Read on for what it actually takes to get a compact 1960s Chevy into that territory.
Murder Nova is one of no-prep racing’s most recognizable names, and Shawn’s newest version swaps in a smaller 482ci Proline small-block that revs to a claimed 9,500 rpm while keeping the old car’s 88mm turbos. The debut pass split the comment section between chassis critiques and loyal fans rooting for the car to find its footing. Watch to see how the new combination performed — and why viewers immediately started calling it “2.0.”
Mark Hassett already owned a Yenko Camaro, Chevelle, and Nova, all painted the same shade of orange, before a Yenko Stinger Vega came up for sale and completed the set. My Car Story with Lou Costabile catches up with the car at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, where decades of Vega rust jokes in the comments collide with a genuinely rare piece of Yenko performance history. Watch to see the car most people forget Yenko ever built.
AMC spent forty million dollars and a million man-hours over three years before anyone outside the company saw the Hornet, then sold the base model for $1,994. It was the first American car with reinforced door beams, the first to offer a hatchback in its class, and the first to sell a designer interior. It also produced a 285-horsepower muscle car that only 784 buyers ever got. Read on for what killed it before it started.
The 1963 Chevy II Nova SS convertible carried Chevrolet’s sportiest badge and bucket seats, floor shifter, and unique trim — but not a single extra horsepower, since the only engine offered that year was a 120-hp inline six. Chevrolet dropped the convertible body from the Nova SS lineup the very next year, making 1963 the only season you could get one with the top down. It’s a rare, six-cylinder oddity hiding behind a performance badge.
A 1974 Nova SS body sitting on a Dodge Ram 3500 Dually 4×4 chassis shouldn’t work — but at the Pigeon Forge Rod Run, it did. Commenters shared their own diesel-swap build specs, debated the wheel fitment, and one claimed to have spotted the exact truck at Silver Lake Sand Dunes in Michigan. Is it a show car, a work truck, or both?