This Wild 1964 Chevy Malibu Funny Car was a Street-Legal, 1,710ci, Allison V12–Powered Monster

Ed Wood built a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu with two Oldsmobile V8s under a stretched hood, decided 500 horsepower was insufficient, and replaced both of them with a surplus Allison V-1710 — the twelve-cylinder aircraft engine that powered the P-38 Lightning and the earliest P-51 Mustangs. It displaced 1,710 cubic inches. It was street-legal. Read on for how a warbird engine ends up in a mid-size Chevy.

Most escalation in the hot rod world happens in increments. A bigger carburetor, then a bigger cam, then a bigger engine, then eventually a supercharger and a conversation with an insurance agent that does not go well. Ed Wood skipped several rungs of that ladder at once. His 1964 Malibu already had two Oldsmobile V8s bolted under a hood stretched more than a foot to accommodate them, making somewhere around five hundred horsepower between them, and he decided that was not enough. What replaced them was not another car engine. It was a twelve-cylinder aircraft powerplant designed to haul a fighter into combat, and the resulting car was licensed for the street.

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When 500 Horsepower Isn’t the Answer

The twin-Oldsmobile phase deserves more attention than it usually gets, because on its own it would have been a landmark build. Two Olds 400-cubic-inch V8s mounted under one hood is not a bolt-together proposition. It requires synchronizing two independent ignition systems, two fuel systems, and two cooling circuits, then coupling the crankshafts so both engines deliver power to a single driveline without tearing themselves apart. Builders had done multi-engine dragsters before, but doing it in a street-registered mid-size Chevy was another matter. Roughly five hundred horsepower was the reward, and it apparently held Wood’s interest for a remarkably short time.

The Man Who Put an Olds 455 in a Corvair

Wood was a Southern California hot rodder with a reputation for exactly this sort of thinking. He had previously built a Corvair with an Oldsmobile 455 mounted in the front, which is roughly as far from that car’s engineering premise as it is possible to travel while still keeping the body. His projects consistently shared a logic that was internally consistent and externally deranged: if a thing could physically be made to fit, the question of whether it should was not considered a real question.

A Perfectly Ordinary 1964 Chevelle Malibu

The Malibu itself was a reasonable starting point, at least on paper. Chevrolet’s A-body Chevelle arrived for 1964 on a 115-inch wheelbase, with the Malibu sitting as the upper trim level and the Malibu SS above that. The engine range ran from inline sixes up through a 283 V8, with a 327 arriving during the model year. It was a conventional mid-size car built in enormous numbers, and the very ordinariness of it is what made the eventual result so effective.

Thirteen Inches Longer, and Shorter in the Middle

The bodywork came first and was radical before any engine change. The front of the car was stretched roughly thirteen inches to swallow the twin-Oldsmobile installation, and the cabin was shortened by a comparable amount, giving the steel Sport Coupe body the proportions of a funny car rather than a street machine. That silhouette, all hood and no passenger compartment, is the visual signature of the whole build and the reason photographs of it register as strange before you can articulate why.

What a V-1710 Actually Is

The Allison V-1710 that eventually replaced the twin Oldsmobiles was built by the Allison Engine Company, then a division of General Motors, which gives the swap an accidental corporate logic. It is a liquid-cooled sixty-degree V12 displacing 1,710 cubic inches, or roughly 28 liters, weighing somewhere around fourteen hundred pounds dry depending on variant and accessories. Depending on the version and the boost it was run at, output ranged from about a thousand horsepower to well beyond fourteen hundred. For scale, a single cylinder of an Allison displaces roughly 142 cubic inches, which is larger than the entire engine in a great many economy cars sold in the 1960s. The bore and stroke measure 5.5 by 6.0 inches, dimensions that belong to marine and industrial machinery rather than anything a person would reasonably consider installing between the front wheels of a Chevelle.

The Warbird Record, Told Accurately

Its combat record is worth getting right, because it is routinely stated wrong. The Allison powered the P-38 Lightning, the P-39 Airacobra, and the P-40 Warhawk throughout the war, and it did power the earliest P-51 Mustangs, the P-51 and P-51A along with the A-36 Apache. What made the Mustang legendary was the later switch to the Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin, which had a two-stage supercharger and transformed the aircraft’s high-altitude performance. The Allison’s weakness was never displacement or reliability. It was single-stage supercharging.

The Problems That Aren’t About Horsepower

Fitting one into a car creates problems that have nothing to do with horsepower. The engine is enormously long, which is why the nose needed stretching in the first place. It is liquid-cooled and rejects heat at a rate that requires cooling capacity no automotive radiator was ever designed to provide. It turns the opposite direction from most automotive engines in some configurations, it produces peak power at rpm figures a car drivetrain never sees, and its torque output is sufficient to destroy essentially any transmission and rear axle a builder can buy over the counter.

Why Surplus Made Any of This Possible

Surplus availability is the reason any of it was possible. Thousands of Allisons were built during the war, and after 1945 they were sold off cheaply into a market that had no obvious use for them. Boat racers took some. Tractor pullers took more. A small number went to people like Wood, who saw a very large engine at a very small price and worked backward from there. That surplus pipeline is what powered an entire generation of oversized American machinery and it has long since dried up.

The Kind of Ambition Nobody Budgets For

What survives is a specific kind of ambition that the hobby produces less of now. A car like this is not fast in any measurable competitive sense, it is not practical, and it would fail any objective evaluation of whether the effort was proportionate to the result. That was never the metric. Wood built it because a 1,710-cubic-inch V12 existed, because it could be made to fit, and because nobody had told him it was a bad idea in terms he was willing to accept. Cars like this are the reason the phrase too much has never carried much weight in a garage.

Share your thoughts in the comments below. Is 1,710 cubic inches too much, or exactly enough?

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