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Unsure of what he wanted to do with the car, LaBrecque’s first inclination was to turn it into a Saturday-night, dirt-trackin’ stocker, but then he recalled the fun he had in the late ‘70s at the recently closed Southeastern Dragway.
A quick build with a $1,200 engine purchased from a friend ensued and LaBrecque began campaigning the car in the 7.50 index class at the eighth-mile Brainerd Optimist Dragstrip, near the Georgia-Tennessee border. “But a lot of people didn’t want to hang around the car because it was really pretty rough and after about a year and a half I decided I was going to get it fixed.”
So, LaBrecque took the car in 2003 to David Bethune in Powder Springs, GA, where it was stripped down to its bare essentials, rebuilt and repainted in just three weeks. Bethune apparently found at least four coats of paint on the tired, old Nova “and when I got it back from the body shop the car was almost a hundred pounds lighter,” LaBrecque says. “Seriously.” Quite clearly the transformation was dramatic as he also recalls when he brought it back to his shop one of his employees told him, “That is living proof that you really can polish a turd.”
With the new look a new engine was called for, too, LaBrecque realized, and one of his business neighbors, Jody Benton at Extreme Truck and Performance, suggested turning the car’s original 350 block into its new powerplant. The plan after running 7.50 was only to step up to the 6.0 class, but once Benton got the go-ahead, LaBrecque decided to move all the way to EZ Street for the inaugural ORSCA season in 2004.
“So we raced the factory motor and I was really proud of that because it’s a street class, factory suspension, DOT tires, and we went even further and raced the factory block that came with the car,” he states. “I don’t think too many guys out here can say that with the times that we’re running and as heavy as we are. We raced with it like that for almost eight months before we finally annihilated it.”
One of the first things Benton did was fill the bottom of the block with concrete. “My understanding is that it makes it stronger down there and seals everything against cracks to make sure it doesn’t get into the oil,” LaBrecque explains. “You could take the water pump off and look down the holes there and see the concrete, so there was really not that much water running through the motor.”
