Sneaky street cars you have had

[BlownBOSS347]

My current Mustang is relatively sneaky......looks stock (besides the wheels), stock interior, idles smooth, quiet blower......but it runs high 11s.

Want to switch wheels for a little sneaky effect for project saggin? :D

[KrisR]

Want to switch wheels for a little sneaky effect for project saggin? :D

I can just throw the 10-holes back on it.

[1badrz28]

oui

[Fast One]

I currently don't have anything that I consider very sneaky. When I was a kid, I did have a couple of cars that were considered kind of sneaky back in the day:

#1) '63 LeSabre - 425 nailhead w/dual quads, headers, two-speed auto w/high-stall converter & a 3.70 posi out back:

On a good day, that car was fugly. Somewhere along the line, it had lost a fight with a deer. The radiator was shot, the grille was smashed, and the headlight trim was gone. For some reason, most of the chrome trim was missing from the whole car. As if that wasn't enough - it was painted purple, for God's sake! It had the original 401 in it when I bought it for 75 bucks. I found a dual-quad 425 nailhead from a wrecked '65 Riv GS that was looking for a home. It seemed like a natural choice - drop the 425 into the LeSabre! I didn't bother fixing the cosmetic damage. Ditto for the paint.

I found some headers for it. I made a pair of NASCAR-style exhausts for it & added cut-outs. Reasonably quiet when closed, but when I opened 'em up, the whole floor resonated! It came with an open 12-bolt w/3.08s. I put in a posi unit with 3.70 gears. It had a two-speed Dynaflow with a switch-pitch converter. I installed a B & M shift kit. I also re-wired the stall-control so I could switch stall speeds with a flick of a switch. I had heard that one could gain some real performance on the low-end by swapping the big-block switch-pitch converter for the V6 version. It worked! When in high-stall mode, the higher stall speed really helped launch the big Buick, while the low-stall mode let me drive @ highway speeds without too much slip. I ran mid-14s with it back in the early 70's. Not too too shabby, considering that most of the stock pony cars were slower, and some of the stock muscle cars of the day weren't much quicker.

I had a lot of fun with that old car, and I think I had maybe all of 400 bucks into it! With the extra-high stall, it sounded kind of like a snowmobile - the engine would rev up, and the car sort of caught up with it. You could hardly hear the revs change on the 1-2 shift. The comments some guys made were priceless. If I won a race, those who weren't familiar with Buicks would usually say something similar to this:

Other guy: "Damn, what kind of trans do you have in that thing? You didn't shift - you didn't shift!!" I'd usually say something like: "Two-speed. Just a two-speed & a switch-pitch." After awhile, I came to realize that many people didn't know what a switch-pitch converter was.

After looking under the hood, the other guy would sometimes ask: "What's that - some kind of weird small-block?" My comeback usually went something like this: "No - it's a 425 nailhead. You wouldn't want to admit that you just got beat by a small-block LeSabre, would you?" Somehow, I couldn't let them go away thinking that they just got beat by a four-door Buick with a small-block....

#2) '70 LeSabre Custom 455 - special order:

This car looked like your bankers' car, but it sounded, well, different. My dad ordered it and had the local dealer (who was a close friend of his) put the Stage 1 package in the engine. The only giveaway was a slight lope @ idle, and most people didn't even notice that. Hmmm.....a 6-passenger banker's car that could run 14.7s all day long, yet only turned 2,200 RPM on the highway. It was ridiculously fast on the top-end. Just the thing for a 17-year-old car guy!

When I raced the '63 LeSabre, I had learned how much time many people lost to me while rowing the gears on their four-speeds. Sometimes, that alone cost them the race. Remembering this, I tended to pick on kids with four-speeds & small-blocks. The big '70 Buick had some very long legs, but that 455 had 510 pounds of torque @ only 2800 RPM. Just what one needs when launching a heavy car with long legs. I usually crossed the line @ somewhere around 98-101 MPH - in second gear!

When I won a race with the '70 LeSabre, the look on the other guy's face was usually priceless. When I lost, I'd ask 'em for a double-or-nothing bet on a 2-mile run from a standing-start. They usually took the bait. I figured that most of those who could beat me in the quarter probably had short legs. Many times, I was right.

Our local GM dealership knew how fast that car was on the top-end. The car was somewhat legendary among the local mechanics. The head mechanic at the dealership said it was the fastest factory car they'd ever had in the shop. Of course, this was back in the 70s. I'm sure they've had a number of faster factory cars in there since then, but according to him - not back in those days. It did have a built-in speed limiter, though: It was a four-door hard-top. When the windows blew out of their sockets, it would stop accelerating.

There is a retired MN trooper who knows exactly how fast that car could go - he clocked me on RADAR when I outran his '69 440 Polara. Fortunately, he didn't find out who was driving until about 25 years later.

Years later, I found out that there were only ~2,200 '70 LeSabre Custom 455s made. I know where it is, and I've been trying to buy it back for over a decade. So far, no luck.

[MR.hp]

:bullshit:

I think it's true as back then I knew a guy also who had one of those and put it on killer boost and was beating the crap out of mustangs, Z's and T/A's but of course back then those cars were pretty slow in the early 80's and it did not take that guy long before he blew it up.