A barn find hunter traveled nearly 16 hours to see the 1970 Chevy Nova SS, figure out if it rolled off the production line with a big-block engine under the hood, and make sure he is taking home the right car, with the right engine and with the right transmission.
Parker Blubaugh of Backyard Barn Finds slides the red door of the garage upward to reveal the 1970 Chevy Nova SS sitting on dollies, with its Tuxedo Black paint covered by a thick layer of dust. He traveled 989 miles (1,592 kilometers) over 15 hours and 36 minutes to see it and maybe trailer it home. He got an email from Christine one day. Two weeks later, he was right there.
Christine’s husband, Vladimir, whom everybody called Val, bought the car when he was 18. At the time, he worked as a bagger at the National Grocery Store in Chicago. Christine says he saved every penny and bought the Nova for $3,000. It was his very first new car. Well, not new-new, but the closest thing to new. The downside was that he bought it with no engine.
Nowadays, it has 54,000 miles on the clock, most of them at the drag strip. He used to race at the U.S. 30 Drag Strip, the legendary venue located in Hobart, Indiana, just south of Gary and about 40 miles outside Chicago. It welcomed car enthusiasts starting in 1954 and until its closure in 1984. During that time, it stood at the absolute heart of the golden era of Midwest drag racing.
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He won two competitions there, and Christine has kept his trophies up on a shelf. “It’s very cool,” she says with pride. One of them is from 1970, his very first year with the Chevy Nova. However, she forgot what engine is under the hood.
Val passed away in 2005, she says, but things don’t add up, so she probably meant 2015. He was a policeman for 27 years and retired at the age of 55 on January 15, 2007. If we were to follow stereotypes, drag racing wasn’t exactly what policemen would consider as a hobby. He also tried his own business as an equipment manufacturer. He had two full-time jobs, a wife, and two children.
In May 2007, the family moved to Yellville, Arkansas. They wanted to live in the mountains and in the woods. They had had enough of Chicago. Yellville seemed like a paradise to the people fed up with the concrete jungle.
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Parker wants to buy the 1970 Chevy Nova SS. Back in 1970, the model hit the market with a starting price of $2,978. Nowadays, while the Nova SS 350 small-block cars sell for anything between $25,000 and $45,000 nowadays, the big-block Nova SS 396s go well beyond the $100,000 mark if they are well-maintained, restored examples.
Parker wants to make a fair offer, but it isn’t easy considering that they don’t know what engine sits under the hood. The car did roll off the production line with the 396, but the one who sold it to him had blown the original engine.
Val, however, wanted to build the fastest car that ever was, so he put a much larger engine in it: a 454-cubic-inch V8 with a big tunnel ram setup. For that, he started cutting through the hood, but never got to complete the job.
Val only used racing fuel in the Chevy Nova SS. Every time he picked up his father, the growl of the big block frightened him. The car has never been painted. It wasn’t even in an accident.
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Parker decodes the VIN, which confirms it is a Tuxedo Black car that rolled off the assembly line in December of 1969 as a 1970 model year. Unfortunately, Christine has zero paperwork. However, she has the broadcast sheets that she found underneath the front and rear seats.
Once an assembly team finished their job on a section of the car, they no longer needed the paper roadmap. Instead of throwing it away, workers routinely stuffed the paper into convenient hiding places just to clear it off the line.
He must also figure out if it is a dual-exhaust Nova, which will tell him if it is a Super Sport or not. With a flashlight directed to the right area, he notices the car does have the doubler plate for the dual exhaust.
It also comes with the Posi-Traction differential, which was an option on the L78 Nova that Parker hopes this car is. For the moment, it does have the “SS” logo, but it is sitting in the wrong place, in the lower section of the grille, instead of being higher up. It looks like it was relocated to hide a flaw in the grille. At the time, cutting out the bars in the grille was a common practice for pulling the camshaft out without dropping the engine.
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What sparks hope is the big block core support and correct fasteners. But there is a small-block heater box in the engine bay, which is not such great news, hinting at a potential presence of a 350-cubic-inch small-block V8. It turns out that the car has the wrong engine and wrong transmission.
It also has the wrong engine badging on the front fenders. They say “396,” even though it is not the case. He is, however, impressed by the great shape of the underside. It does have surface rust, but it surely won’t fall apart. Christine says it has always been garage-kept and never left outside.
Parker and Christine strike a deal, as he is willing to pay the price they have originally agreed on, one that he doesn’t disclose. She is heartbroken to let it go but knows that it is in good hands now.
