In The Beginning

[useless tony]

Originally Posted by ZiggyL78

We were setting up the suspension here to run this Stan guy in Oshawa. If I had to run anyone who I thought was a contender I would always test the car where we were supposed to run the day before.

Wouldn't be Stan M driving a blue '68 Camaro would it?

Regarding testing the road/strip the day before ... does that mean you drove the Vega to Oshawa from Scarborough on slicks both times or did you swap tires once in the area?

Loving the stories and really cool you have pics too.

[ZiggyL78]

Originally Posted by useless tony

Wouldn't be Stan M driving a blue '68 Camaro would it?

Regarding testing the road/strip the day before ... does that mean you drove the Vega to Oshawa from Scarborough on slicks both times or did you swap tires once in the area?

Loving the stories and really cool you have pics too.

Maybe I think I trailered it that night.

[ZiggyL78]

Back when I was still in High School I started to visit all the car hangouts. I kept seeing this orange Camaro driving around town. It was clean and simple. Orange on black buckets and Cragars all round (I hate those square ones). Looking back it may have had stock exhaust. When you put a lumpy cam in a big block to me it sounds like it is choking. Mopar Hemis in a Challenger or Cuda had the same type of sound. I mean 2 1/4" exhaust behind 425+HP is a bit of a joke. I always thought GM engineers had a bit of a sence of humour. Maybe they thought there isn't much of an exhaust system that we can design that head office will and still work on these high HP cars. I think they knew that most guys were going to replace the mufflers and probably the whole exhaust system anyway.

Speaking of exhaust systems we sure did some back yard work in our driveways in those days. We had about 20 guys in our group and everyone had a piece of equipment that they shared. One guy had a welder, another had a tire machine and so on. I remember going over to my buddies house to help him put chambered pipes on his L78 Nova. I'm not sure which coins we used. I think they were quarters that we used to fill in the gaps between the head pipe and the chambered pipe. About 5 guys showed up and even after everyone chipped in we still ran out of quarters and had to raid my buddies little brother's piggy bank.LMAO. After a few beers and a handfull of quarters it was done. Of course all the jokes were flying and we were like a bunch of kids laughing our heads off. One guy said any power you picked up will not be enough to overcome the 200 #s of weld you used.lol.

So I couldn't understand why this car had no SS or 396 emblems to show it was a special model. All I did know was that I wanted it. The owners name was Angelo Colangelo. The only reason I remembered his name was that it rimed. My father was a manager of The Beer Store and he set me up with the stores bank manager. He more or less told me if I saved half the money that he would lend me the other half.

So much for that idea.It wasn't easy but I moved on and bought another Camaro. I figured I would never see the orange one again. One night hanging around Harveys a buddy of mine drives in with this orange Camaro. My buddy was a used car salesman. I knew the car right away.This was in 1972 and the car had changed hands a couple of times. Someone had blown the original motor. Ya. I know. Too bad. Back then the car hadn't reached a cult following and not yet a valueable collectable. People didn't identify the car as a COPO. It was a 427 Camaro. The car didn't sound the same as the last time I heard it 2 years ago. Who ever blew the 427 up had replaced it with a brand new crate open chamber LS7. Just for laughs they also replaced the 4.10s with 5.38s!!! To say the car was a handfull on the street was an under statement. On top of all that it was still a 4 SPD! Who ever owned the car when all these mods were done was not a nickel and dimer. The car had the best of everything and was built right. Other then all this someone had also painted the car blue.

So just to keep things interesting I bought the car. Without a serious tire a 340 Swinger could have beat this car. The car was dangerous to anyone who did not respect this kind of power. You couldn't nail this thing when ever you wanted to with real street tires. You had to get into the right mind set. Sit back in the seat and tighten up your seat belt. 1st gear was just not useable on the street. Even second was nuts and don't even think about a power shift. On a good road 3rd gear might hook but don't count on it.

A friend of mine knew the car and told me he saw the car run some low 11 second passes and had gone 11.1. The rear end was a stock 12 bolt except for the gear. It was guarantied the car would break an axle after 4 passes at the track with slicks on. The owner at that time would always have a couple of new axles with him when he went to the track. No idea why he didn't just buy after market axles he would scribe a line right down the length of the axle and check to see if the line had moved. If it had it was time to change that axle.

Gas was getting expensive and hard to find and with a 5.38 gear, 12.50 to 1 pistons, and a big cam, the car wasn't very streetable. I was also more interested in the Vega at the time so I built a low compression BBC with 3.73 gears. I drove it to the track and it ran low 12s in full street trim and pump gas.

[Stihl]

I look forward to your stories. You have truly had some fantastic rides my friend.

[EZ Nova]

Ziggy, was Ray Barton even a name runner on the street back then??

[CamaroNOS]

Originally Posted by ZiggyL78

Sorry for the late response John. I have so much on the go now. So Jim's car was originally orange? Have you got any pics of the car when you finished the restoration? It must have been amazing. I have some of those pics. Tom Wilson who owned B&T is still around. He's on Facebook. Thanks.

NP.....I understand.

Jim's Camaro was originally Cortez Silver, see below. These pics were taken at MCACN after the restoration.

Its funny you mentioned a orange Camaro. I am sure you would also be familiar with another Camaro I owned which was a Hugger Orange/Orange Houndstooth interior car (not Jim's). This car was another 1969 RS Z/28 "GM of Canada Show Car Account" that was displayed at the C.N.E. (Canadian National Exhibition) in 1969 to promote the new GM line up. And it too was used as a drag car for quite some time at Cayuga Dragway as well.

Paul

[ZiggyL78]

Beautiful Paul. They don't get much nicer. I'm sure Jim would be proud.

[ZiggyL78]

I decided to sell the Camaro as I read in Hemmings that guys in the US were getting very good money for them. Hemmings was the only real publication that talked about collectables and advertised suppliers for restoring cars. It wasn't the magazine style, it was the catalog style which was mostly black & white and was almost 1" thick. The last time I looked you can still buy them in most large book stores. Worth the read if you have never seen one.

I advertised the car in Hemmings and sold it 2 days later for 3 times what I bought it for as a roller. We made a deal that I would pick him up at the airport and I would trailer the car to a friend of his in Michigan. Turns out his friend was the president of the AMC club of America. It was the middle of winter and I was hoping for clear weather.( Oh ya sure. NP!)

At the time I was having a custom trailer built, so I bought my buddies used, I mean well used trailer as it had a expensive winch on it and good tires that I wanted. It didn't have any axles. There were 4 wheel spindles from a car welded to the frame. (Oh ya. That will work) . I also had a 1973 full size Mercury wagon that I had bought from my brother in-law who was a Mortician. It wasn't the funeral car. Yes. That's right. It was the meat wagon. Boy. I got ribbed about that one for a long time. YaYa. I get it. Ribbed, meat wagon. lol. It was a normal looking grey wagon as there was no tinted glass or panels were the side windows were. It did have a black vinyl roof which sort of gave it away. On Saturday nights if there was rain and no racing we would go down town and do the Young Street crawl. Yonge Street was once considered the longest street in the world and it runs right through Toronto to Lake Ontario. The main drag.

So my Nutbar friends thought it would be funny to make up a phoney coffin and put someone in it going down young street at 3:00 in the morning. Dam I wish I had gotten a pic. He did a pretty good job on this fake casket. To finish off the car he got some white shoe polish that we used on the windows of our race cars for numbers and put a name on the sides of the car. He called it WACKEDOUT FUNERAL HOME!

So here we are driving down young street late at night. The street is jammed with cars and you can hardly get the car going more then a walk. You also had to stop every 100 feet or so. It was that bad. The music is blaring and people are acting goofy as it's Saturday night. I'm driving and I can hardly see the road as I am laughing so hard that I was crying. We had the tailgate down. So I'm looking for some older family to get in front of to enjoy our funny little prank

So I go extra slow so people will pass me until I see the right group. People are driving up beside us and yelling your tailgate is down. So finally an unsuspecting family gets behind us. An older couple with a bunch of kids and a big dog. So we stop and my 2 buddies in the front seat with me turn around up on their knees and lift this aluminum ladder which is under the casket and the casket starts to slide out. It falls out right in the middle of the road. Now the first thing I hear is the screams of a couple of women and then the screams of grown men. So I go to get out and my buddie pulls me back and says just wait a minute. I turn around and watch Rick jump out of the box. More screams and now I hear people start to laugh. I mean all the cars and all the people walking are watching this whole deal. So Rick grabs the box and throws it back into the car and jumps in. He says drive man.

I saw a couple of cops on the other side. So I drive off and get off of Young and turn down a side street into a parking lot. Everyone piles out and falls to their knees, we were laughing so hard.

[Bill Pritchard]

Originally Posted by useless tony

Loving the stories and really cool you have pics too.

x2. All the crazy stuff my friends and I used to do back in the day, no one ever thought to have a camera along to record for posterity

[69M22Z]

Originally Posted by ZiggyL78

I decided to sell the Camaro as I read in Hemmings that guys in the US were getting very good money for them. Hemmings was the only real publication that talked about collectables and advertised suppliers for restoring cars. It wasn't the magazine style, it was the catalog style which was mostly black & white and was almost 1" thick. The last time I looked you can still buy them in most large book stores. Worth the read if you have never seen one.

I advertised the car in Hemmings and sold it 2 days later for 3 times what I bought it for as a roller. We made a deal that I would pick him up at the airport and I would trailer the car to a friend of his in Michigan. Turns out his friend was the president of the AMC club of America. It was the middle of winter and I was hoping for clear weather.( Oh ya sure. NP!)

At the time I was having a custom trailer built, so I bought my buddies used, I mean well used trailer as it had a expensive winch on it and good tires that I wanted. It didn't have any axles. There were 4 wheel spindles from a car welded to the frame. (Oh ya. That will work) . I also had a 1973 full size Mercury wagon that I had bought from my brother in-law who was a Mortician. It wasn't the funeral car. Yes. That's right. It was the meat wagon. Boy. I got ribbed about that one for a long time. YaYa. I get it. Ribbed, meat wagon. lol. It was a normal looking grey wagon as there was no tinted glass or panels were the side windows were. It did have a black vinyl roof which sort of gave it away. On Saturday nights if there was rain and no racing we would go down town and do the Young Street crawl. Yonge Street was once considered the longest street in the world and it runs right through Toronto to Lake Ontario. The main drag.

So my Nutbar friends thought it would be funny to make up a phoney coffin and put someone in it going down young street at 3:00 in the morning. Dam I wish I had gotten a pic. He did a pretty good job on this fake casket. To finish off the car he got some white shoe polish that we used on the windows of our race cars for numbers and put a name on the sides of the car. He called it WACKEDOUT FUNERAL HOME!

So here we are driving down young street late at night. The street is jammed with cars and you can hardly get the car going more then a walk. You also had to stop every 100 feet or so. It was that bad. The music is blaring and people are acting goofy as it's Saturday night. I'm driving and I can hardly see the road as I am laughing so hard that I was crying. We had the tailgate down. So I'm looking for some older family to get in front of to enjoy our funny little prank

So I go extra slow so people will pass me until I see the right group. People are driving up beside us and yelling your tailgate is down. So finally an unsuspecting family gets behind us. An older couple with a bunch of kids and a big dog. So we stop and my 2 buddies in the front seat with me turn around up on their knees and lift this aluminum ladder which is under the casket and the casket starts to slide out. It falls out right in the middle of the road. Now the first thing I hear is the screams of a couple of women and then the screams of grown men. So I go to get out and my buddie pulls me back and says just wait a minute. I turn around and watch Rick jump out of the box. More screams and now I hear people start to laugh. I mean all the cars and all the people walking are watching this whole deal. So Rick grabs the box and throws it back into the car and jumps in. He says drive man.

I saw a couple of cops on the other side. So I drive off and get off of Young and turn down a side street into a parking lot. Everyone piles out and falls to their knees, we were laughing so hard.

Awesome story.