Chevrolet Nova 2nd Gen

The 1966 restyle is what gave the car its looks. Chevrolet reskinned the Chevy II with a sharper, more grown-up body drawn in part from the Super Nova show car, adding a semi-fastback roofline, gently humped fenders and an angular tail that echoed the full-size 1966 Chevrolets, all of it still on single headlights and vertical taillights. It reads as a scaled-down big Chevy, which was the intent. The Super Sport treatment was deliberately restrained: bright sill moldings, an aluminum panel across the rear cove, SS badging and special wheel covers, with bucket seats and a console inside. For 1966 the car wore Chevy II SS emblems; for 1967 those became Nova SS, the grille picked up a black-accented insert, and the SS borrowed the full wheel covers from the 1965-1966 Impala SS. There is no scoop, no stripe package shouting for attention, nothing to announce the L79 underneath. That understatement is a large part of why the car is loved. It looks like exactly what most of them were, and hides what a few of them could do.

The 2nd-generation Nova never had a factory racing program, and it is not a road-racing car. Its natural home was the drag strip and the street, where a light body and a strong small-block are exactly the right recipe. The L79 SS was a ready-made stock-class drag car and a giant-killer at stoplights, and that quarter-mile and street reputation, rather than any circuit result, is the competition story that matters here. It is a sleeper, and sleepers do their racing where nobody is watching.

The 1966-1967 Nova holds a specific and enduring place in American car culture: it is one of the original sleepers, the everyday compact hiding a serious engine, and that idea has outlived the car itself. Among Chevrolet enthusiasts and hot-rodders the L79 Nova is spoken of with real affection, a small-block believer's car rather than a big-block showpiece, and the shape remains a staple of the grassroots drag and street scene decades later. It never became a poster on a bedroom wall the way a Corvette did. Its fame is quieter and inside the hobby, earned at stoplights and in the classifieds rather than on screen, which suits a car that always did its best work without drawing attention.

Living with one is mostly easy, with one big caveat. The Chevy II is a semi-unibody, so rust in the floors, trunk, rear rails and subframe mounts is structural, not cosmetic, and a car that has rotted there has lost strength that filler and paint only hide. That is the thing to stay ahead of: keep it dry, fix rust early, and it will not come back to bite you. Everything mechanical is refreshingly friendly. The small-blocks and manual boxes are among the toughest, best-understood drivetrains ever built, they tolerate neglect and reward simple maintenance, and nothing under the car will surprise a competent home mechanic. The chassis is of its time. The 1966 cars have four-wheel drums on a single-circuit master cylinder and want a long look ahead before you need to stop; the 1967 cars gained the federally mandated dual master cylinder, a real safety improvement. The light rear end that makes the L79 car so lively will also spin a wheel or wag its tail on a damp road. None of it is a deterrent. It is simply an honest 1960s compact, and an unusually rewarding one.