On Friday, I dug up some archival stuff on Doug Marion’s old ’74 Chevelle Malibu Classic. This was the last time PHR did a Colonnade-style ’73 – 77 GM A-body project car (prior to our ’75 Laguna Project Talladega). This particular story appeared in the February 1980 issue, which would’ve been put together sometime in October 1979.
In the previous blog archiving this same car’s exploits, the idea was to tune the Chevelle for max fuel economy on Edelbrock’s emission’s dyno. In this new story which ran the following year, Doug swaps out the stock cam for a new Crane RV cam. Among the high points is the large amount of wear on the stock timing gear (the original engine only had 22k miles on it). The factory had also retarded the cam timing and even marked the timing gear dot one tooth retarded for that purpose. Apparently, that was news to a lot of people back them, including Doug. Also of note is the fact that they chose not to replace the stock valve springs—and wondered why the engine was breaking up at 4,800 rpm!
Finally, it’s interesting to note how these cars were treated back then. They were just ordinary Chevys coming to the end of their regular lives—not sought-after hot rodding fodder. I’ve kept the images as large as possible, so you can read the pages. Enjoy!