If one wants a serviceable muscle machine with lots of low-cost opportunities, then, one can hardly go wrong with the venerable small-block combined with the 1968-’74 Nova chassis. Who knows if that’s what was on the mind of this car’s original purchaser, but that’s what he got when he took home a 350/four-speed Super Sport back in the mid-1970s.
That kind of practicality also wasn’t on the mind of Derek Redden, of Muncy, Pennsylvania, when he first saw his ’74, but it has served him well. Rather, Derek, who was only 16 at the time, just knew that his neighbor had a neat old car and it was up for grabs. It took some doing, but in the spring of 1998, Derek was ultimately able to talk his father into the purchase.
Part of Derek’s father’s reluctance came from something that has caught up a lot of car folks over the years–rust. The Light Gold Poly car looked good, but because it had spent its entire life in Pennsylvania, there was more rust lurking beneath the surface.
“The car, from a distance, looked really nice,” Derek says, “It had rust over the rear fenders and it was rusted under the taillights–but they were all that way. Most of the rust was in the floor. It actually looked really good from a distance. Being that the car was gold and rust is brown, it looked really good in pictures when I got it. It had Cragars and Radial T/As.”
A year-and-a-half restoration project saw the car receive new quarter panels and patched floors. Father and son obtained all the patch panels via trips to the Carlisle swap meet. They also added subframe connectors to stiffen up the Nova’s unit-body and deleted the stripes and oversized SS decals that had come on the car originally, substituting the more-subdued trunk decal on each fender as a nod to the car’s heritage.
“Originally, we just fixed the rust, painted it and put subframe connectors on it. I was just going to drive it around, and then my dad bought me a set of headers for Christmas, and it’s been kind of downhill from there.”
Derek enjoyed the Nova unmodified, save for the subframe connectors and headers, through his high school years, but then, “I got out of college and I bought a house and the car got parked off to the side, and I just drove it around every now and then. I didn’t do much with it. Then I hit a deer with it going to work one day. It smashed it up pretty bad.”
The accident repairs involved the substitution of a Goodmark two-inch cowl-induction hood in place of the flat factory unit. But while the car looked good, it wasn’t seeing as much use as before until a serendipitous encounter breathed new life into the project.
“My uncle’s father-in-law, when I was 17 or 18, took me to a bunch of autocross races. I rode in the car and helped out. I never really did anything about it, but I really liked it. I was driving through town one day, and the people who I now autocross race with just happened to be having an event in a parking lot. I was interested in that, so I swung in there and got their information and stuff. It was the last race of the season. I had no idea how to set up a car, so I bought a set of wheels and a set of leftover tires off Craigslist and showed up at an autocross race. I had a blast. I wasn’t very good at it at first, at least I didn’t think so. I improved and the car has improved too.”
That was four or five years ago, and since then, Derek has made myriad improvements to the car based on his autocrossing experience. Derek laughs, “I’ve got a folder full of receipts about an inch-and-a-half thick. I’d be scared to add them all up.
“It doesn’t have a lot of major stuff done to it. I’ve been doodling with it for years and got it kind of sorted out. It’s got bigger sway bars on it. It’s got stiffer springs. It’s been lowered two inches in the front and a little less in the back. It’s got taller ball joints in the front. It’s all aligned up so it oversteers more than it understeers.
“I’ve still got the factory 8.5-inch 10-bolt with the factory Posi. I put new axles in it and welded the tubes on it and put a cover on it to stiffen it up.”
Derek reports that the original disc/drum brake setup remains intact. “It’s still got the factory brakes on it. Pretty much everything is new; it works good. I put brand-new tires on it. I went with a little wider tire on it this year.” The wider tires are made possible due to Derek’s efforts to reduce lateral movement of the rear axle. “I just put Delrin-aluminum bushings and huge shackles on it.” He’s also added adjustable shocks from Hotchkis Performance.
Because of the very modular nature of the rear-steer X-body, all of Derek’s modifications can easily be reversed should he or another owner get the bug to return the Nova to showroom condition, circa 1974. “I’ve got all the original parts for that car. I could take it all apart and put it all back to original, but I like it better this way.
“I still have the original engine,” Derek reports of the Nova’s factory installed 350, but he doesn’t run it. “It had been rebuilt prior to me getting it. I ran it for a while autocrossing it, and I wore it out to the point where it needed to be re-ringed. The compression started to get uneven. I’m pretty hard on the engine autocross racing, and I didn’t want it in there in case something were to go wrong and break it.”
Derek did not fall into the bigger-is-better mantra in constructing a replacement; instead, he selected one of the less-beloved of the small-block family. “I have a 307 in it right now. It’s out of a ’69 Chevelle that my neighbor had for a family car for years. That was the original engine in that car, and he didn’t want it, and at the time I needed an engine.”
Most car folk can sympathize with that kind of “because-I-had-it” motivation. But there’s also an element of the “because-I-can” that comes into play.
“And then at some point, I raced a Mustang and the guy was whining about how I had a bigger motor and he didn’t–he had a 302 in it. I had run across a build sheet for a 307 where they had gotten 325 horsepower out of it. I had this motor and all these parts, and I said, ‘I’m going to see if I can make some power with this thing.’ I tore it all apart, and the cylinders were in beautiful shape, so I honed it out and put all new parts in it and stuck it in that car. I’ve gone two seasons of autocross racing with it. It runs pretty good.”
The effort Derek lavished on the lowly 307 extends to everything beyond the block, crank, rods and main caps. He used ARP fasteners throughout, treated the engine to a baffled, seven-quart oil pan and a windage tray and topped it with 58-cc heads from a 305 with enlarged intake valves. More than one source has reported that the 305 H.O. heads are well suited to performance builds on smaller engines. The whole works are crowned by an aluminum intake and breathe through a 650-cfm Holley double-pumper. And yes, those Christmas-gift headers are still extracting the Nova’s exhaust.
Derek reports that the smaller-displacement small-block works well with the way he runs the engine in race events: wound up. In fact, he selected a Lunati Voodoo camshaft that makes most of its power from 1,400 to 5,800 RPM, and he keeps his rev limiter set at 6,500. To mesh that high-winding small-block with the factory 3.42 gears, Derek replaced the Nova’s original four-speed with a “three-groove” Saginaw four-speed.
“I had that transmission in the garage. I wanted lower [rear] gears in it after I ran it a couple times. I was running it around in first gear, and it wasn’t quite geared right. I was looking at gears and thinking about that. It just happened that second gear [in the Saginaw] was just a little higher than first gear in the original transmission.” But, he says with a laugh, “That’s another thing that screwed it up for drag racing.”
The three-groove Saginaw was originally intended for smaller, lower-powered GM vehicles and has steeper gear ratios in first through third. Derek reports that the effect was similar to a swap to 4.56 gears, but still allowing street-friendly cruise RPM.
While Derek still runs the car on the street, he says its uncompromising nature has made it less suited to drivers who are unfamiliar with oversteer.
“I don’t drag race it very much because I’m not very good at drag racing a stick-shift car. I’m not very consistent. I’m all over the map. And it just doesn’t work very good for drag racing anymore.”
But having a single purpose in a street/track car isn’t a bad thing, and Derek has been rewarded with increasingly better performance on autocross days.
“In the range of cars there, from full-on race car to completely stock, it’s usually somewhere in the middle. It’s not the fastest thing there, but it’s by far not the slowest thing there, either. It’s a fun car–it’s competitive. It’ll beat a C4 ‘Vette in the autocross.”
To see what all the fuss is about autocrossing and hear the beautiful noise coming from that hot 307, you can even aim your computer at Derek’s brother, David’s, YouTube channel, Black Hood Productions, to see Derek’s car in action. It won’t be long and you’ll likely find yourself perusing the Hemmings classifieds looking for your own X-body to modify.
Do you enter your muscle car in some form of competitive motorsports on a regular or semi-regular basis? No matter if it’s drag racing, rally racing or anything in between: We’d love to hear from you. Print-quality photographs (or digital images), comments and contact information should be submitted to Weekend Warrior, c/o Hemmings Muscle Machines, P.O. Box 2000, Bennington, Vermont 05201 or e-mail Dave Conwill at wconwill@hemmings.com.
