Weekly car reviews: 2/18 1966 Chevy Nova SS

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Welcome to Dirt Every Day, I’m your host Fred Williams and today we take a break from motorhome sized go karts and driving Diesel jeeps underwater and instead take a break from the normal, backyard built budget brawlers and jump into something very cool, very wacky, and very capable off road.

We hopped on a plane (not something I’m very fond of) and landed in the Outback of Australia. After meeting up with our old pal Warren, he carted us to the nearest Horizon festival where I was introduced to the Ariel Nomad for the first time.

Warren claims he just picked this shade of green out of the air. I guess he meant the arch and banners in the air? Anyways, I didn’t care what color it was, I just wanted to get it dirty!

As we headed down the highway to our test spot, we ran across a Class 10 race buggy. I guess everybody out here just has these kind of cool off road machines huh?

We reached the construction site and I wasted no time throwing the awesome Nomad into the sky as I hit a “small” dirt mound a little too fast…

I tried to see if we could climb a buried tire, but all I really managed to do was verify that the full floor skid plate works really well. So the Nomad as a teeter-totter, not such a good idea.

We hung out all afternoon, “hooning” around the construction site and surrounding areas, just getting a feel for the Nomad’s balance, which is pretty good considering it’s got the Honda 2.4 liter engine in the back, suspension travel, which is also good thanks to Ohlins shocks, and just how it drives in general. It has enough power to be fun but not dangerous, and the wind in your hair open cockpit experience is great. Also, the night sky in Australia is way better than I expected it to be.


We camped out overnight, swapping stories of races won, woman lost, and cars and trucks we still lust after. I was a little nervous about coyotes, but since we didn’t have any babies that could get eaten I didn’t worry too much.

The next day we set up a course through the still unused construction site. The cops in Australia must be super understanding, as this place wasn’t abandoned, it was just the weekend. But, I’ve never been one to turn down a chance to tear up some dirt so once we got all the track markers set up, I strapped in and got to running laps.

The Nomad’s power and weight balance coupled with the mud terrain type tires means drifting on the street is really easy and happened quite often while I was pushing it hard.

It floats through the air and the suspension is really good at soaking up the landings of the many small jumps on this course. I loved this shot too! I had it blown up and framed, and I’m going to hang it in my shop when I get home.

Water doesn’t slow it down either. It just splashes through and keeps on moving. Man this thing is awesome!!!

After running a bunch of laps, I decided to call it because I wanted to get back out in the open desert and just blast through the dunes in this thing. Unfortunately, we lost the sd card with the footage from desert. Sorry guys! Anyways, my best time was 49.449 seconds. I felt pretty good about it, but I’m sure others could do better.

All in all, I call this thing a beater. Cause you can beat on it and it can take it! It’s not the fastest, it’s not the most capable off road, it’s not exactly affordable (Warren said this one costs around 80k USD) but it was a lot of fun. That’s all for now, catch you guys later! Keep wrenching, keep wheeling, and stay dirty!

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Another great review, man!! Nice work!!

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Hello guys and girls, Marty and Moog here back for another episode of Mighty Car Mods! Last month we ventured to sunny southern California to meet up with Freiburger and Finnegan of Roadkill to build and bash on some cool cars. We introduced them to AWD turbo power coupled with Aussie style in our stylish and fast “Subar-Ute” WRX and they showed up what nearly 700bhp worth of power in a rusty old american barge could do.

Well, once we got back we realized the bug had bit us, and we wanted to see if we could build a rusty and grossly overpowered death trap too, so we posted a plea on our Facebook page looking for someone who might have something and our friend Alfia told us to check out her project car. We zoomed over to Byron Bay to see what she had.

We were stoked to see a '66 Chevy Nova sitting next to her house. Yeah it’s a little rough, but if we learned anything from the Roadkill guys, it’s that beauty is more than skin deep. Popping the hood we were giggling like little school girls at seeing the big V8, and after waking Freiburger up to ask what the 327 ci engine could put out, we nearly lost it when he told us it could make nearly 350hp!

We quickly purchased it, and towed it back to the shop. New ignition, battery, and fresh fuel was all it took to bring it to life.

Now that we had the old girl running, man did she run! Talk about POWER! We heard there was an event going on where we could safely run the SS on a closed course, so we cranked up the engine, rolled down the windows, and cruised along the coast to Surfers Paradise to compete in the run-what-ya-brung Three Bridge Circuit event. It was a hot lap contest, and we were told our car would compete in C Class. We knew with the skinny tires, soft suspension and big v8 power it would be handful but didn’t realize how much!

First lap out and first turn, I spun it big time. Major pucker factor! That wall came up on me so fast!

I let Marty take the keys and I took up a camera and captured him nearly capsizing our boat. Looks like shocks might be in order soon!

Soon enough though he was getting the hang of it and you would have thought we built a power skidder the way he was hanging the tail out and roasting the tires!

We had a great day at the track and the Nova was a real champ, and besides trying to kill us with every hard corner exit it never gave us any grief.
Our best run of the day netted a time of 1:15.590 or something close we forgot to grab the timeslip, probably because the self preservation instinct was so high we couldn’t focus on much else! The Nova is a real handful!

But we had to have MORE. So back to the shop it went and after a few calls to some local “weapons dealers” some real firepower showed up in a big crate. Our new view looked like this after we installed said firepower:

We enlisted some help from some friends and in true Aussie Style, we built it into a true power skidder, complete with a massive supercharger on top of the new 7 liter LS engine, plus we replaced the suspension and wheels, brakes and some more but in true Roadkill style we did NOTHING to the body. We sent some pics to the Finnegan and Freigburger and they said it was nearly perfect, now it just needed to break down a half dozen times and it would be just like their work. They were huge fans of how we fit the massive rear tires too. The body was already rusty so we just cut out the fenderwells haha!

We invited a local hotshoe and friend, Vic Reign to see what he thought of our car, but he was more focused (he says skilled) on going fast than we were, and posted a pretty quick time on the airstrip, so we tried to match him and just couldn’t get that last tenth of a second. Maybe next time eh Vic?

At the end of the day, though we did what we set out to do, and that was meet some cool blokes and sheilas, have some fun with our mates, and build a ridiculously over powered car to destroy tires with.

So that’s how we ended the day, destroying tires down the runway. Thanks for coming along for the ride, see next time!

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It’s interesting to see how lower class cars compete in terms of laptimes. Im a solid 21 seconds faster on the Three Bridge Circuit in a bone stock P1 lol.

Love reading these reviews by the way!

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Thanks man! Yeah most of the bone-stock cars can’t get anywhere close to decent leaderboard times. There are a few exceptions though!

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Another great review!! Keep it up!!

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