1968 Chevrolet Corvette review from North America

Suspension got out of alignment at both ends.

I didn't actually own this car, a friend did, and he brought it into my small-town speed shop for a rebuild. He'd used his severance pay from the Army to buy the car, and, having recently lost his thumb in a punch press in the factory in which he worked, he'd decided to spend the settlement he'd got from the factory to full-house the L88 (which is a legendary species of hi-po 427) in his '68 Vette.

To convince me that he actually needed a rebuild, he took me out of town, hitting over 130 in the first 1/4 mile of country road, and indicated I should listen to the dreadful roar of that engine, and within it, find cause to agree with him about its need for a rebuild. The car was wandering all over the road at that speed, so I quickly agreed, to get him to slow down. He hit the brakes, and the 'Vette snatched from one side of the road to the other, even worse than it had been wandering. On the way back to my shop, I told him he really needed to get the both front and rear suspensions aligned, badly.

But he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to get into my Chevy High-performance catalog. So we selected the highest-performance cam that Chevy made for that engine, short of the FI competition cams, an Eidelbrock 2500-6500 rmp torque-range intake manifold, an 850 CFM Holley double-pumper carb, and an ignition advance kit, I put new rings, bearings, pop-up forged pistons, oil pump and seals in the block, got a three-angle valve job from my machinist, unshrouded the valves in the combustion chambers, clayed the piston tops to guarantee that there was no valve-to-piston interference, buttoned that sucker up, tuned it, and put it back in his accident-prone hands, telling him I figured it for about 550 (SAE Gross) horsepower, and not to take it over 5000 rpm for the first month of driving it. A mutual friend told me he saw him spin it up to 6500 rpm the first night.

That same night I was in a local service station in our small town, and the owner told me (word gets around in a small town) that I'd "as good as killed that (30-year-old) boy".

But I'm of the firm opinion that you don't ask a professional mechanic to do something like this unless you're as grown-up as he is; after all, if he's not careful and knowledgeable about what he does, your engine will blow up in his face. I'd warned him about that alignment.

And, of course, he didn't listen. He went off the road about 2 weeks later, at about 150 miles an hour, sideways, and took out about 1/4 mile of quality fenceposts. It didn't hurt him a bit, but it covered most of that pasture with fiberglass. He sold the remains for as much as he could get, and the last I heard that L88 was installed in what had become the fastest tow truck in the county.