9-Second Twin Turbo 406ci Chevy Nova Blows Up In Street Race

This Ratty Big-Power Nova Terrorizes The Highway Before Blowing The Intake Manifold

Danger to manifold! Didn’t these guys ever watch the first Fast and the Furious movie?

A pair of 76mm turbochargers and big displacement do wonders for making power, and this guy claims it makes over 800 horsepower and runs 9.01 at 155 miles per hour in the quarter. That is one wicked fast Nova. While we don’t condone any sort of shenanigans like this on the street, this video then shows the Nova taking on a few competitors in highway roll races. The first car to face off with this nuclear Nova is a bolt-on modified Nissan GT-R, and the Nova wins by a country mile. As the Nova pulls ahead of the GT-R there is something coming from the back of it that might indicate an imminent failure, though it might also be road debris, it’s difficult to tell.

In the second race, our protagonist Nova comes face to face with a supercharged C6-generation Corvette with a supercharger fitted. When the Nova gets on the power this time, instead of pulling ahead as expected the power drops and the driver hops off the gas to be safe. Someone following behind claims that something came off of the Nova and bounced before hitting their car in the door. A preliminary investigation doesn’t show too much in the way of destruction, possibly just the intake manifold being pushed up off of the block. When the car got into boost if one of the pistons burned a hole in the block, it could have super-pressurized the crankcase and caused that intake to come clean off. With that kind of boost on a motor like that, it wouldn’t take much of a variance in ignition timing to cause a problem like that.

Whatever it was that actually happened here, it could have been so much worse. If the Nova had sprayed oil down on those rear slicks, the whole shooting match could have gone pear-shaped in a split second at those kinds of speeds, and without any kind of emergency crew standing by to tend to the wounded, the prospect looks more and more grim. Do us a favor and take your racing to the track in safer and more controllable situations.

-via 1320video