The dateline was April 1981—or in actual time, right around January 1981. (During the ramp up for the Daytona 500.) The turmoil of the second big gas crisis was being felt, and Detroit was answering with smaller cars. The large Malibu/Laguna of 1977 melted away into the crisp, compact G-body Metric platform of 1978. The big boat T-birds likewise followed suit, downsizing in 1980 from its aircraft-carrier—like proportions of 1979.
Changes were afoot in NASCAR too, as the big bricks of the ‘70s gave way to relatively the compact warriors of the ‘80s. For the 1981 Daytona 500, Neil Bonnett was driving for the Wood Brothers, which by definition, meant changing from Chevy to Ford.
As we begin work on our ’75 Laguna S-3 project—which is a tribute to Neil Bonnett’s Number 12 Laguna—we thought it was cool that we bumped into this old Popular Hot Rodding story written by Michael Parris. For the record, the early ‘80s was one of the few periods that PHR occasionally covered NASCAR.