Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. A well-worn cliche’, and an apt phrase describing my aborted 1972 Pontiac Ventura street/strip project that you see here.
I’ve had the racing bug for as long as I’ve been into cars. As a kid, I would watch classic racing movies like “LeMans” and “Hot Rod” over and over again, daydreaming of the day that it would be me behind the wheel of some insanely powerful machine, pushing it and myself to the limit.
In the early 90s I finally got my first taste of real side-by-side competition when I resurrected my 1968 Mercury Cougar XR-7. It was a rough, rusty $300 beater with no drivetrain that I purchased from a fellow student at El Camino College, where I was taking auto shop classes at the time. Within a year I had it running and driving with a warmed-over 302 and beefed C4 trans.
Around this time I became friends with a fellow named Timothy Iskenderian, who happens to be the youngest son of legendary cam grinder Ed Iskenderian. He introduced me to Brotherhood Raceway Park, the now-defunct Terminal Island drag strip established by legendary street racer the late “Big Willie” Robinson.
I had an absolute blast and was hooked. I raced off and on for several more years on the weekends until 1999 when Cougie’s tired engine finally gave up the ghost. I wanted desperately to bring the car back to life- this time as a dedicated drag racing machine. Sadly, that never happened due to a combination of budget and schedule. Being both a reliable friend and a dutiful son also sharply reduced my wrenching time. In the summer of 2012 I reluctantly sold it to a young man who was eager for a Cougar project.
As I watched it roll away on the back of a tow dolly, a realized that a big piece of my youthful dreams was rolling away with it. My regret was short-lived, however, as I already had this ’72 Ventura waiting in the wings.
During the summer of 2009, I spotted this ’72 Ventura in the “CARS FOR SALE” section of Ecology Auto Wrecking. Its price had already been marked down to $875, and I knew what that meant. If it didn’t sell at that price, the next step was being placed out in the yard where it would be parted out and its gutted shell crushed.
Although the GM X-body is not my first choice for a muscle machine, they’re still somewhat cheap to buy, replacement parts are cheap and plentiful, they’re fairly lightweight, and they swallow a big-block with ease. All those factors make these cars excellent dual-purpose machines for the track on Saturday night, and church on Sunday morning. There were a bunch of guys swarming around it like vultures on a zebra carcass, but I was the only one with the cash. Not missing a beat, I paid the $100 deposit and paid the balance a week later. I had it towed to my apartment garage, where it stayed for a year as I tinkered with it.
Due to my plans for it, I made all the alterations necessary for turning it into a proper street/strip car. I completely redid the brake system with all new hydraulic and hard parts. I installed new Auto Meter gauges, and started running wires and relays for all the stuff a car of this type typically has- electric fuel pump, electric cooling fan, aftermarket gauges, nitrous system, exhaust cutouts, high-energy ignition, vacuum pump ( for proper power brake and auto trans operation with a lumpy cam ), and a separate vacuum pump for the crankcase evacuation system.
Using a nylon dead-blow hammer, I carefully flattened the rear inner fender lips to provide clearance for wide tires without rubbing. Inside, I partially refurbished the interior, installing new dash pad, a billet steering wheel mount kit, and refurbishing the factory plastic dash bezel. I also ditched the factory sheetmetal screws and reassembled the dash with stainless machine screws and lock nuts to prevent anything from getting jarred loose during those hard wheels-up launches I planned to do.
I also installed these snazzy Weld Draglite wheels that I had originally purchased for the Cougar, and shod them with brand new Kelly HP4000 radials, 205/65R15 in the front and 245/60R15 in the rear. Alternately, I planned on buying a second pair of Welds shod with Mickey Thompson Front Runners and either BFG Drag Radials or Hoosier Quick Time drag slicks at the rear for track days, but that never happened. The Welds and Kellys have since been sold and I have a complete set of fat n’ skinny steelies with generic dog dish hubcaps to take their place.
You can tell a lot about a person by what’s in their vehicle. When my prize was carted home, I immediately started rummaging through it and found some interesting things. Among the stuff I found in the trunk included numerous beer bottles ( some full, some empty ), an old wooden skateboard, a backpack containing an empty 1-liter bottle of tequila and a large candle, countless empty guitar string packages, an old, dirty “STUSSY” baseball cap, and a piece of plywood with carpet glued to it. Inside, there were several beer bottle caps decoratively glued to the underside of the roof, and the ashtrays were crammed with cigarette butts and even an empty condom wrapper (!) .
Put all that stuff together, and a pretty clear profile of this car’s previous owner emerges. He was most likely young ( 18-30 ), liked to party, liked to skate and surf, had some musical talent, was most likely unemployed or underemployed, didn’t have much money, and may have had problems with alcohol and / or drugs. For his former ride to end up at the scrappers’ with his personal property still inside, and with the general state that the car was in, it doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of the past owner’s eventual fate.
This guy apparently wasn’t much of a mechanic either. This car suffered some of the worst neglect, abuse, and mechanical kludgery that I’ve ever seen in my life. At some time the original steel fuel line must have cracked or rusted through, because the previous owner fabbed a new one from copper. Problem is, he did it half-ass. I guess he couldn’t get it bent quite right and became frustrated, because he cut the line in two places and spliced it back together with rubber hose. It wasn’t even proper fuel hose- it was the cheap thinwall stuff used for aquarium pumps. Making matters worse, he had one of those cheap clear plastic fuel filters dangling dangerously close to the exhaust manifold. Pontiac flambe’, anyone?
The fun doesn’t end there. The exhaust downpipe is artfully tied to the manifold using wire hanger on both sides, apparently after the factory studs either broke or pulled out. Unbelievable. When the rubber front subframe bushings began to disintegrate from age, wear, and tear, he wrapped SPEAKER WIRE around them in a valiant but futile effort to hold the hard, brittle chunks together. I wish I were making this up.
The final coup de grace came courtesy of the poor tire selection and the damage that resulted. This car was shod with dinky little 185/70R14 radials. Say… let’s put severely undersized tires on a 3400 lb. car with sagging springs, pile 2-3 people in the back seat, load all our stuff in the trunk, and go for a ride. What could go wrong??? A lot could go wrong, and it did. This guy must have had a bad habit of jumping curbs or going off-road, because the gas tank is thoroughly bashed in, along with the trunk floor being pushed up a couple of inches.
This guy isn’t just a hack, he’s a menace.
Despite those problems, the car really isn’t in bad shape. The exterior sheetmetal is all original, mostly straight, and almost completely rust free except for a tiny bit of rot at the bottom rear of the wheel arches where dirt gets slung up by the rear tires and trapped in the little pockets there. The heater / defroster switch is broken, but I’m not worried about that. The interior panels and back seat are in good shape. The front bench is trashed, but if the car doesn’t sell I’m putting buckets in it anyway. The car’s biggest fault bodywise is the slightly munched front bumper. So far, no one makes reproduction bumpers for Venturas, so having the original straightened and rechromed is my only option unless I find a clean, straight used one somewhere.
With visions of an appearance on the TV shows Pass Time and Pinks all Out dancing in my head, my next planned step was yanking the tired 250 I6 and dead Powerglide out and shoving a really nasty big-block in between the front fenders once I completely rebuilt the front suspension and replaced the rotten subframe bushings. I had even bought a slightly used, recently rebuilt Turbo 400 trans to go behind this mythical monster engine. That’s right about when my quest for quarter-mile glory hit the wall.
For a couple of years, I had been keeping the Poncho in my parents’ garage. It was a perfect arrangement. My dad parks his car in the driveway since maneuvering in and out of the garage is a bit awkward due to the way the property is laid out. Whenever I was over there visiting or fixing something for them, I could just stroll out to the garage and mess with the car a bit.
That all changed due to my dad’s mail-order shopping habit. Within a few years, my dad’s numerous purchases began to overwhelm the house, to the point of being a safety hazard. Eventually all his boxes and boxes of stuff were banished to the garage, where they fought for space with the car. My mom became increasingly concerned that my 85 year-old father would trip, fall, and hurt himself while trying to squeeze between the car and all his bounty, so the car got evicted. It went to my friend’s outdoor storage facility in Gardena, Ca., where it remains to this day, sitting next to my ’71 GMC Sprint.
This car’s future is rather uncertain. Every time I’ve tried to work on it, fate has always conspired against me in one way or another. Whether it’s rescuing a stranded friend, getting caught up in another one of my parents’ home/garden projects, or fighting some sort of illness, something would always happen to stop me from going near it. The last time that I planned to do a marathon wrenching session on it, I got nailed with an especially nasty stomach flu that left me bedridden and bathroom-bound for five days, including all Presidents’ Day weekend.
Right now I have this car listed on Craigslist and have gotten a few inquiries, but no serious offers. In any case, this car will not be scrapped or parted out. If it doesn’t sell as is, expect to see it at Bob’s Big Boy or Irwindale Raceway sometime in the future. Hopefully.
Keep at it !
Baby steps will get you there , you’ve already done quite a bit .
-Nate
+1
If someone is going to go the ‘not-a-Chevy’ route for a streetrod, there are far worse choices than the Nova-based Ventura. For starters, Pontiac V8s are virtually interchangeable, so stuffing a 400 or 455 into one that came from the factory with a 350 isn’t that difficult.
Someone else can post a picture of Roy Scheider’s Ventura from The Seven-Ups. I’m still pissed they used the soundtrack from Bullitt when the real cars’ exhausts, although muted, would have been infinitely better.
IMCDB had some screenshots of Roy Scheider’s Ventura http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_18012-Pontiac-Ventura-1973.html
And the Ventura isn’t alone to get the Bullitt soundtrack, the 1969 Plymouth Belvedere in McQ driven by John Wayne also have the Bullitt sound. It would had been more believable if it was a 383 or 440 V8 under the hood but not if the motor is the slant six.
A friend had one of those Venturas (hatchback), with the same I-6 and PG. It always seemed to get him there, but I remember the leaky-hatch headaches.
I hadn’t thought about the front bumper not being the same as the Nova item, but I suppose that was part of the “transformation” into a Pontiac. I’m gonna have to search for a pic of a ’72 Nova bumper, to see the difference…
p.s. I tip my hat to your wrenching skills. I think of 1960s-70s cars as easier to work on than today’s, but you’ve done plenty of work I wouldn’t dare to try.
p.p.s. Thanks to eBay and Amazon and everything else online, I’ve heard plenty of similar tales of older folks buying and buying and buying…
It looks like the Nova has a curve stamped into the bumper that matches the bottom of each headlight. The Ventura’s bumper is flat all the way across. It’s really kind of goofy, considering how easy it would be to use the same bumper for both cars.
I had the same thought about the bumper — it looks like rudiger has already found the answer to that question.
When I was a kid, my parents had a ’73 Ventura hatchback, bought new in the fall of 1972, which they owned until 1978. It’s the earliest car of theirs I can remember being on the road. The hatchback body style was new to the X-body lineup for 1973, and wasn’t available in earlier years. The hatchbacks remained all the way down to the end of RWD X-body production in 1979 but never sold well.
BIL lived with us while going to college. Had same car, even the same color. Had a little 26_ v8. I liked my Nova better for most everything but he was happy.
Luck to you. Hope you keep it. Have had my 57 since 1972 and it’s hard to get to work on it. It’s worth more to me now that the gas is no longer $4/gal.
I’d get her up & running with a cheap small block. That’s a lot better then having it towed when you have to move it.
Sorry to hear you’ve had such bad luck. I am 55, and have been an amateur drag racer since my early 20s (yes, I did some street racing as a teenager, out in the middle of the desert, not in town. I saw the fallacy of that and gave it up) I have raced a number of cars, including a 1977 Pontiac Ventura with a 383 (350 block/400 crank) Currently racing a 1993 S10 pickup with the same basic engine in it. I’ve always been a Chevy or at least a GM guy, but my next car is a 1964 Ford Fairlane. I plan to build a Thunderbolt replica out of it. Being pre emissions, it can be driven on the street as well as raced.
My ’62 Beetle project is well over 15 years in process at this point… I feel your pain! Hopefully it will get some attention this winter.
“Mechanical Kludgery” would be a great name for a band, BTW.
Or “Kludge and the Improvs,” maybe.
Isn’t 185/70R14 pretty close to the stock tire size on an X-body? The performance option on an early-70s Nova was E70-14, which if memory serves is about 195/70R14. (I’ve never really gotten my head around the letter-code sizes.) I don’t doubt that either is inadequate for drag racing unless you’re using kei-cars, but a lot of stock tires of the time would look dinky on your better modern lawnmowers.
That sounds about right to me. 185mm is just over 7 inches… and up until a few years before this Ventura was built, it wasn’t uncommon for fullsize American cars to leave the factory with bias-ply tires even narrower than that.
That’s not to say the skinny tires were ever a good thing, or sane even, but 185 width radial tires for this car seems adequate. The very last GM G-bodies from 15 years later came stock with 195/70/14s.
+1 on the alphanumeric sizes being confusing as hell.
The very last G-bodies, and the very first downsized A-bodies (which turned into the G-body) used almost the same thing. My Malibu’s stock tire size was 195/75R14. I “upgraded” to a slightly wider 205/70-14. Still find it odd that a large vehicle (almost 200″ long, 3200 lbs.) uses such dinky little tires, but that was evidently the way it was done in the 70’s and 80’s.
That sounds right; years ago I had a ’73 Nova that had ER78-14 tires. The Nova had a factory 350 with a four speed and 3.73 gears; it was easy to overload the back tires without really trying. Eventually we swapped in an LT1 from a wrecked Corvette to replace the factory engine, which made traction even more of an issue. I don’t think I would want this car as my daily driver today but it would be a hoot to drive some sunny afternoon, charging up and down thru the gears.
You’re probably right. The base-option tires on most muscle and pseudo-muscle machines of this area weren’t known for being very generous in size or proportion.
The front tires I had on there were 205/65R15s, which were a good fit for the somewhat narrow front wheelwells. Even though I sold the wheels and tires seen in the photos, I have three 15X6 and two 15X7 steel wheels that I obtained from several junked 77-84 B-bodies during my Pick-A-Part excursions. 245/60R15s are the biggest I can fit in the stock rear wheelwells without minitubs.
Better still, I have a half-dozen good used 205/65R15s stockpiled at my job, waiting for a vehicle to go on 🙂 .
Just throw the engine in it and drive as-is – it looks cool with it’s face punched in.
I know they’re just slightly different Novas, but I like pretty much all of the X-body cars – especially Pontiac’s version. If I had this exact car, I think I’d go get a Chevy 292 six (the truck engine, like Canadian Pontiacs) and then try to restore it in the style of the old Tempest Sprint; 4-speed, buckets/console, HD suspension… whatever factory goodies you could still get in 1972. Or at least, that’s what I’d do if I had millions of dollars laying around and all the spare time in the world.
I feel the pain of not having anywhere suitable to work on a car. What with my perenially not having any storage space, my Malibu has lived on my parents’ driveway for over 10 years now, which isn’t really conducive to getting anything done given that they live 3 hours away from me.
Still, it sounds like you’ve done a large portion of what needs work on the Ventura, and it’s a cooler car to see than just another Nova. Hopefully you’ll have the time and resources needed to finish it up and take it down the dragstrip like you’ve intended!
I do have a good, rebuildable Chevy 350 that came out of my ’66 Biscayne. Plus I have a forged 4340 steel crank ( for a Chevy 350 ) that a generous friend gave me many years ago when his V8 S-10 project fell through.
Does anyone here know if a standard 2-bolt main block can survive the combined hit of 11:1 compression AND a 250HP “wet” shot of nitrous?
Does anyone here know if a standard 2-bolt main block can survive the combined hit of 11:1 compression AND a 250HP “wet” shot of nitrous?
Well, it’ll definitely do it ONCE…
Hey I had one of those, too… yours is WAAAY better than mine was, though. Mine was a green 4-door, but with a Pontiac 350. I traded a guitar for it, and ended up selling what was left of it for $100. 99% of the floor and trunk were gone, and the rest of it was so rusty it eventually broke in half. But it got me to work and back for most of a winter, instead of hoofing it so it was worth it.
Wow…
That’s definitely the roughest X-body I’ve ever seen! If you got it for a guitar and sold the remains for $100, you definitely made out.
Unless the guitar was a Fender Stratocaster- then you got screwed.
No, it was a Hondo bolt-on neck Les Paul copy. Although my Ventura got recycled a year after I got it (in 1989) and my buddy still has the Hondo…
Now that I think of it, I sold the wheels and extra radiator that were in the trunk for $20, plus I turned in the dozens of beer cans all over the interior so I really made out well on this deal!
A good size for oem tires on a Nova/Ventura of that vintage would be 225/70R14. They will fit fine under the fenders. If you want to use it as a drag car, it will need some serious rubber out back, whether you use street tires or slicks. I have raced my S10 with both slicks and 275/60R15 street tires in the rear. I am not a believer in using wheel sizes over 15″. The huge rims (ree-uhms, if pronounced correctly in high ebonics). are nothing but ghetto bling. Super wide low profile tires have some merit in autocrossing, but not in drag racing, and definitely not on the street. I have seen so many beautiful vintage cars ruined by these hideous things. Fortunately they are bolt on.
Cool project! It is really tough to work on a project car that is not at your house when you are busy person. I would see about a junkyard small block motor to swap in so that you can drive it while you work on it. I see quite a few junkyard GM B bodies with LT1 motors.
This galaxie was my longtime project to get back on the road–what I did was rent space in a decent shop for a few months and hit it hard after work and during the evening until I got it back together. Having the shop with a rental charge gave me some additional motivation so finish the car.
I read this back in the ’70s; NOVA was Nova, Omega, Ventura, and Apollo. Coincidence??
Back then Chevy, Olds, Pontiac, and Buick had to have there own version of practically every GM car. While many Ford and Mercury cars were much the same, GM got a bit carried away with it. It led to ridiculous parts proliferation. And while Ford used the same part number for the same part, no matter what car it went on, GM had a different part number for every model, even if it was exactly the same part. I have a Hollander manual from back then, and it is unbelievable how many parts were interchangeable between different models.
Cool project!!!
I wish I had your mechanical skills.
Nice Nova!