This Could Be The Baddest Corvair on the Planet
Any story that starts out with two people on their way to an event called the Mountain Moonshine Festival has got to be a good one, especially if it involves restomodding a Corvair that was once damned by consumer advocate Ralph Nadar.
Talking shop with the missus
The Corvair may not be on many people's radar and holds some infamy due to Ralph Nadar's book Unsafe At Any Speed, but this was the only American designed mass-produced car to use a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine. We found this write-up on a Corvair restomod that fixes all the quirks of the original on Super Chevy and had no choice but to shine some light on it for all of us to bask in its glory.
“We were in Smokie’s ’48 Willys Jeepster on our way to the annual Mountain Moonshine Festival (in Dawson County, Georgia). I’m in the back seat with my wife, Terri. We’re sippin’ tea (’shine) and talking about what car to build. Terri says, ‘Let’s build a car we can beat on versus beating on our beautiful first-gen Camaro.’ That one was featured in CHP and called Baby Boomer’s Boom,” JB informed. “Yeah, we were just drunk,” he confessed.
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A little friendly competition
John Bradley Granger wanted to beat Detroit Speed & Engineering co-founder and President Kyle Tucker and Brian Finch in autocrossing and needed something off the wall to do it with. “Clearly, I needed a game-changing concept to beat two awesome second-gen Camaros,” he explained. It is a friendly rivalry so no one is looking to run anyone off a track.
“The third reason I built FnNader (a nod to Ralph Nader’s virulent Corvair harangue) was to race it in the second season of (Speed channel’s) ‘R U Faster Than a Redneck.’ I was sure contestants would not know what a Corvair was, let alone a FnNader, a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he quipped. Unfortunately, the second season of “Redneck” never materialized.
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Happy wife, happy life
The start of the process was this: “Once your wife says let’s build another car, you best hurry up. Under a large dosage of tea [editor's note: read as "tea"] and after viewing a ’66 Corvair body, the prescription for FnNader was born. Days later, I purchased a running ’66 and Smokie and I began brainstorming on how we would build an awesome Pro Touring-style Corvair.”
The perfect Corvair was spotted on Craigslist and JB picked it up for $1,500. “The body was real solid, except for the floor. We did not need the floor. We wanted to put the engine in the back seat area and fabricate a one-off tube chassis.” A car like this would afford the team with a blank canvas in which to do whatever they pleased. One of the original crew members was Clay Fowler, who sadly passed away before the Corvair could reach completion.
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Power to weight ratio is very important
Smokie turned the car over to Classical Gas Hot Rods & Restoration to maintain the correct weight balance and have what load was there, distributed advantageously. That weight approach is why JB and Smokie elected to retain the back motor location instead of having a front engine spot. “We needed weight in the middle of the thing. It was like building a dirt car in the old days; we used a piece string to do the measuring,” he laughed. Using Corvette suspension points, Smokie built the chassis within the Corvair body. At the front and rear of the Corvair are C5 components including the stock spindles, PAC springs over JRI shock absorbers and bumpstops from Fab-Worx with Finch Performance mods.
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The cherry paint job on top
While the protracted build was going on Rusty Grindle installed the aluminum wheel wells, finish up the body and paint the car with a stunning metallic red. After that, the interior of the car was done Greg Pirkle upholstered the Procar seats and what was left of the passenger pod in leather.
JB is going to use downtime in the winter to build up the LS2 to be somewhere in the 500 horsepower range for just the right amount of grunt. JB remarked, “Since unveiling the car [after a four-year gestation], I think so many people saying this car is ‘sick, badass, best Corvair I’ve ever seen’ are just a few comments that make such a complicated build worth it!” We think so, too. But we'd love to get Ralph Nader's thoughts on it.
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