A buddy of mine has been into cars since 1936 and was a Ford flathead guy until early 1955 when his hopped-up '51 Ford hardtop got passed by some type of unknown green sedan like he was sitting still. When he caught up to the car at a gas station he discovered that it was a 1955 Chevy 150 four door sedan with the 265 V8, three on the tree and overdrive and was actually a bone stock company car for a local Oklahoma oil well drilling company. My question for those of you who remember 1954/55 is: What was your first encounter with the then new Chevrolet V8?
Although I was born the next year, my next door neighbor used to tell the story that he was sitting at a red light in his 32 with a 3/8 X 3/8 flatty when a new 55 Chevy pulled up next to him. Light turned green and he left on that 55, but by second gear the Chevy had pulled ahead. He parked the car the next day, yanked the Flat motor and went shopping for an SBC. Took him six months to find a wrecked one and he never looked back.
i was 13 when that came out. it was THE car. it was my first ride at 100+ and always left an impression. the guy who owned the car had traded a lowered, nosed and decked, 2dr shoebox for the new red and white hardtop. 56 yrs later i can close my eyes and see the fields and hedge rows click by!
for me, what was more impressive were the 1957 series 150 2dr sedans w/ the fuel injection set up. i don't remember any with 4speed but the 3 speed would be so so off the line and then the shift to second would carry them thru the traps at nearly 100mph. exciting for those times.
Guess it depends on what you drove in the 50's. I had a 34 Ford olds powered with 3X2 and didnt have any problem with the 55 chevs. Later on in 57 went to the ford 312 blown Y block and was able to hold my own.There were some really fast chevs but not that many on the street and drag strips were becoming popular at that time in Texas. The 283 and 327's gave you all you wanted to deal with though and you had to be on your game to compete.
I bought a new '55 210 Delray two door, 265 with powerpack and 3 speed column. At Santa Ana drag strip when it was 2 months old I floated the valves and popped a keeper, blew a piston apart. Took it to Reath and Mallard in Long Beach and came out of there with a little more horsepower. Speed equipment for the 265 was just becoming available then. That car is my avatar.
I never had any problem with the Chevys with the Olds powered Fords. I used to go to the Santa Ana Drags. I think the little Chevys only fan about 75-76 MPH. There was a lot faster cars than that including flatheads. I really never liked them.
On a Friday morning in October 1954, a day before the 1955 Chevrolet appeared in dealer showrooms, a pal and I flat-towed another pal's '32 three-window coupe through the outside service line of the local Cadillac/Oldsmobile/Chevrolet dealership for a sneak preview of the new cars which were under cloth covers. We had ditched school for the day so we could attend the first NHRA-sanctioned drag race put on by the Dust Devils CC at Inyokern, California. The pal who owned the Deuce was a first-string varsity football half-back and was scheduled to leave on the team bus for a Friday night game at Burroughs High School in -- as luck would have it -- Inyokern! Anyway, we stopped in the service drive, jumped out of the '47 Mercury tow car, and threw back the front of the cover on one of the five new Chevies parked side by side. We lucked out and struck pay-dirt as we lifted the hood on one equipped with a V8. As hard-core young Ford gearheads we were not impressed with the little orange lump that looked like it could be taken apart with no more than a screwdriver and a crescent wrench. We did rather like the Ferrari-style grille, however, and quickly slammed the hood shut and pulled the cover back in place and beat a hasty retreat as the sales manager came out of the showroom and began shouting at us. The weekend of drag racing went better than we could have imagined. After addressing a tech-inspection problem (no hood or covering over the carburetors -- solved with a sheet-metal panel donated [unknowingly] by Coca-Cola, cleverly trimmed to fit with borrowed aircraft snips, and secured with bailing wire at all four corners), we were classified and ready to run. And run we did, kicking butt all day long to win our class and qualify for king-of-the-hill eliminations that were common back then. Depending on the mix of cars and bikes and the range of abilities the program usually concluded with Top Eliminator for the really quick hardware, and Little Eliminator for all the rest. Our 221-cid 180-degree Norden-crank flathead did just fine, logging quarter-mile speeds just over 100 mph (no ET's were recorded) until we came up against a 270-cid 12-port 'Jimmy' in a '37 Chevy coupe in Little Eliminator. The Deuce was respectable for most of the distance, but by the end of the quarter he had us by a car length or better and close to 10 mph. Considering that the three of us were still 16 and 17 years old, still in high school, and we were beaten by old guys in their 20s with good-paying jobs to pay for their racing, we were rather pleased with ourselves and the class trophy we were awarded at the end of the meet. Our nemesis -- the old guys, from the other side of the track We hooked the towbar to the Deuce, tossed our few tools, a half-done five-gallon can of alcohol, and a similar one of gasoline, along with our sleeping bags and dirty clothes into the Mercury's trunk and blissfully headed back up the Owens Valley for an easy and familiar three-hour drive home. The wonderful weekend came a cropper about half-way home, on the northern edge of a little high-desert town called Olancha, in full view of the diners in local cafe, where we were run off the road by an approaching drunk driver. The Mercury with the Deuce in tow vaulted sideways over the bank of an irrigation ditch at the base of a three-wire barbed-wire fence, taking off only the top wire before tumbling upside-down and then spinning 180-degrees at which time the Deuce came loose and shot backwards into a stand of cottonwood trees. The Mercury came to rest on its wheels, and the three of us were out of it like a shot! Across the road, the diners came running from the cafe to help or for whatever motivation that prompted them to be there right away. It was soon clear that the only substantial injury was to the pal who owned the Mercury, and who had been sleeping in the narrow back seat when the accident occurred, and had suffered a head wound when the coveted trophy, parked on the skinny package shelf in the coupe, had spun off and cracked him on the noggin, with scads of blood pouring down his forehead. With only minor cuts and bruises, I was the logical guy to be helped back to the cafe to call home for help. The father of my pal who owned the Mercury was the service manager for the local Ford-Mercury-Lincoln agency, so when I called my dad, he called my pal's dad and they were on site with a wrecker within a couple of hours, by which time we'd been fortified with enough good '50s style cafe entrees and desserts to keep us going for weeks! The post-race wreck got us off the hook for ditching school and garnered all sorts of sympathy points from adults other than our parents, plus -- more important -- from just about every cute girl in school. Trust me when I tell you that a slight limp, a brave smile, and a sincere 'thanks for caring' are big steps toward to happy-guy status. My pal's Mercury sitting in his backyard, a block away from our high school campus, didn't hurt our cause one bit. What this all comes down to is that two of the more memorable events in my gearhead life occurred simultaneously -- my first race win and my introduction to the most important piece of all-time hot-rodding hardware -- Ed Cole's Chevy V8. Eight months later the Chevy V8 would come into my life for real, but that's another story . . . . Mike p
wombat barf, My dad had both a '55 150 with the powerpack engine and a '57 with the 270hp dual carter engine. He tells a great story about his buddy from the dealership who ordered a plain jane wagon and slipped the powerpack engine into it. NOONE noticed until some kid at a gas station asked him how he liked the extra power... the kid noticed the deep groove pulleys
After serving 4 years in USN & discharged in 1955, my dream was to get my '49 Ford tudor engine built up for 3/4 race street & drag + good looks. When the '55 Chevy's came out, I checked out that "tiny" little motor sitting in lots of extra space in the engine compartment at the local Chevy dealers, & thought to myself "thats not much of an engine". Months later my friend, just out of the Air Force, bought a new '55 Chevy 2 door hardtop with 3 on the tree. It didn't take long-----We lined up, blasted off, I took him in first gear, speed shifted to 2nd, & last thing I saw was his tailights, underneath was that famous emblem "V-8" which meant "power pack"!!! I had spent my mustering out money ($500 bucks) to get that flathead neat & got blown off by a "stocker". That tiny little V-8 in the new Chevies made me a believer from that point!!!------Don
I was in the Air Force at Mountain Home AFB, Idaho and my hometown was Portland. I had a 1950 Bel Air Chevrolet that would stay with the Cadillacs and Lincolns on the road which was U.S. 30 before the freeway. There wasn't any speed limit in Oregon back then and cars on the road travelled in clumps with the faster clumps passing the slower clumps. In the desert in Eastern Oregon our clump passed a 1955 Chevrolet Oregon State Police car parked with his headlights shining across the road. I thought it doesn't make any difference, he can't possibly catch us, but he did. In less than a mile and gave me a warning.
I was 13 in 1955. While in the bus on the way to school one morning a black '55 Chevy hardtop went through an intersection ahead of us and I thought it was the most beautiful car I'd ever seen. It was a power-pack and rumored to be the fastest thing in town....I found out later that the REAL fastest car in town was an Olds-powerd 38 Chevy coupe. I still think of that car whenever I go through that intersection.
More info on the wagon- it was a '57 black 150 and the owner (who worked at the dealership) had a 270hp engine put in, but with a single carb.
Great thread, I enjoyed reading you guy's history. Takes me a to a place in time I never experienced. Thanks for posting!
It was on a late fall afternoon in 1956. I was 9 years old, and quite aware of V8's as my dad had traded the 6 cylinder '50 Ford 2-door Custom (his first new car) for a '56 V8 Mainline fordor earlier that summer. A blue '56 Belair 4-door with an HD 45 trike attached to it's rear bumper pulled into my friend Bruce's driveway. His grandmother had bought it, and an elderly black man in a chauffeur's hat and coat from King Chevrolet delivered it. I was impressed. The representative form King unhooked the trike and folded the tow bar over it's front fender. He then showed the new owner, and us kids, the car's key features. I was so taken with the trike, that all I remembered was the gas filler behind the tail lamp, and the fact that it was a V8. That evening, I went back to Bruce's, and we went to the dark garage and inspected the car ourselves. It was fantastic, way cooler than my Dad's Ford. I will never forget the smell of that cold, autumn night interior, the feel of that cold gas filler bar, and sitting in the passenger seat behind that glittering symmetrical dash.
I was riding shotgun in a '46 Ford coupe with an olds V8 when a '40 chev coupe pulled up at a light. The '46 ran good and we figured it would be over quick. It was! The '40 had a 265 and was car lengths ahead in first gear. I met two new friends that night. One was the chevy V8. Norm
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