His First Hotrod
“My first hot rod. God, I loved this car. When the transmission went on the Grand Prix, a girl who I worked with, had a boyfriend, who new someone, selling a 1973 Camaro. Did you get all of that?
So I went to look at the car. It was sitting outside of a house right off of Commack road in Deer Park. It had a brown door and steel wheels. It looked pitiful and drove worse! The owner assured me that it would run great if I had it tuned up. I was so damn gullible and plain old stupid that I bought it. I think I paid $400 for it. I proceeded to drive it up to Deer Park avenue and get it tuned up at “Precision Tune”. The guy who did the tune ( I later worked with this guy at Jiffy Lube) told me to take it easy with the car, because it was fast. Huh?! Yeah, right, OK. I get in the car and drive up to Montauk Highway and while driving through West Babylon, it starts to drizzle. Immediately after it starts to drizzle, I see a few guys in a late model Monte Carlo SS from school. The all laughed and pointed at me and the car. I was probably rather upset and wanted to get the hell away from them, so I floored it. The transmission kick-down engaged and the skinny bald tires started to spin. I went sideways, almost into on-coming traffic and then swung back towards the guys in the Monte. Finally I got a little bit of traffic and blew past those guys like they were standing still.
It was definitely a sleeper. It had a two barrel Rochester and stock, cast exhaust manifolds! As I drove the car, I found that it MUST have had .411 gears and a shift kit. It wasn’t exactly “fast”,but I raced and beat a Grand National at the time. So that would probably put the car in the mid to low 14 second range.
One day I was putting gas into the car and decided to find out what the tire valve near the gas filler neck was for. Oh! air suspension. Now that the car could be jacked up in the rear, I needed bigger wheels and tires. I went to a tire and wheel place in Lindenhurst and bought a set of Torque-thrust D wheels with tires, however, my friend Smitty liked them and was willing to trade for a set of four Cragar wheels with N-50’s on the back. Sweet.
After plotting and scheming with my friend Donato in 1st period History, we decided that he would put a cam in and do some other things to hop it up. Well, that was the end of that. He knocked the oil pickup off when he put the distributor back in and that turned one of the lobes on that new cam round. The shop that dismantled the motor said that it looked like it had a lot of nice work done to the heads. I parted the car out for like $500. That really sucked!”