1931 Stovebolt—The Sensory Overload

This 1931 Chevrolet Five Passenger Coupe isn’t a gasser and never could have been.

But that didn’t matter when I latched the door shut and plopped into the scalding aluminum bucket seat. My once white t-shirt snagged on the prehistoric wood bracing as I strategically maneuvered my camera bag and sombrero up against the flat aluminum firewall. Gripping my Nikon D7000 like a combat reporter, Kip Hansberry entered the red-tinted interior. He slid into the neighboring seat and attached the metalflake steering wheel to the simplified column assembly while simultaneously slipping his massive Converse All-Star beneath the Moon pedal’s safety loop. After fiddling with some switches, he primed the engine and fired the uncorked big-inch Chevy that was being dumped just a few inches beneath our feet. He slammed the 5-speed into gear, shearing the translucent shifter knob right off the gracefully curved handle. Over the radical idle of the motor I concluded that he said something about it being so hot that the threading had melted earlier that day. In complete befuddlement of the surrounding scenario, all I could manage to mumble was something along the lines of “That’s why they call them hot rods, they’re supposed to be hot.�?

Not only was Kip’s car hot, it was a sensory overload. From every angle I felt twangs of Lou Lang’s “Hydro-Phobia�? 1932 Chevy sedan B/Gasser and the Vickys of Larry Teeter and the Samsel Bros. Perhaps there was even a little bit of the gravity-defying “Qualifiers II�? 1928 Chevy sedan. This wasn’t by accident. Not by a long shot.

You may recognize Kip’s name from his previous build, the “White Noise�? Chevy II AWB. When it was sold and shipped off to somewhere in Utah, he decided to pull the trigger on a bone stock 1931 Chevrolet Five Passenger Coupe in October 2012. According to Kip, his original plan was to create a gas class car with 10 percent engine setback, but the grille and water pump wanted to share the same space. With the help of his fellow Border Bandits car club members, he dropped a menacing 505 ci. Chevy and TKO 600 transmission between the rails at a 20 percent setback. Kip kept things era-correct up front by retaining the parallel leaves and drilled stock front axle, while a 4:10-geared Dana 60 occupies the rear.

With a mere 10 days until the Meltdown Drags, the car was in nothing more than a chassis and pieces of a body. Kip and his club members thrashed on around the clock and finished it the night before the event.

Although he managed to make a few passes on the Byron asphalt, there are still some details to work out, including a more traditional induction setup. I’m not concerned, because after talking with him at great length about nose-up Vickys and musty magazine collections, it’s clear that he knows how to nail the look, feel and pure rawness of drag racing’s heyday.

-Joey Ukrop